I think there are two opposite causes here: either an overly-aligned or completely unaligned mental model.
For developers, bug-blindness tends to be because their mental model is so close to the system's model that both have the same blind spots, and the developer can't effectively think outside the system (the classic "QA walks into a bar, orders 0 beers, orders -1 beers, orders 0.999 beers" vs "customer walks into a bar, asks where the bathroom is, bar immediately bursts into flames").
On the other hand, a common way for regular people to interact with a system is they just... don't have a model. None at all. Like, they click a thing and see what it does, and if it doesn't do what they expect they shrug and click something else. The horror of seeing a non-software person using a software system is realising that they usually cannot tell the difference between expected and unexpected behaviour, because they don't really form expectations in the first place. The computer is more genie than machine.
You can see this in the article: "Google Docs added some kind of delay such that the typing you do into the title box right after you open the doc gets overwritten". That's a developer forming a model of the system. The lay alternative is to simply learn that sometimes when you type in a box, the text appears. Other times, it doesn't. If it doesn't, you try again.
You don't need to understand the system if you abandon the assumption that the system was designed to be understood. And, in practice, the widespread plagues of shitty engineering, anti-features, and lack of respect for the user often combine to make that model the more information-theoretically optimal one.
In that sense, the very thing that makes us miserable is our perverse need to treat Google Docs as an engineered product rather than a cross between a djinn and a symbiotic fungus.
> a common way for regular people to interact with a system is they just... don't have a model. None at all. Like, they click a thing and see what it does, and if it doesn't do what they expect they shrug and click something else. The horror of seeing a non-software person using a software system is realising that they usually cannot tell the difference between expected and unexpected behaviour, because they don't really form expectations in the first place. The computer is more genie than machine.
This is completely lost on most developers, which is why interface and UX designers exist. Developers, especially in FOSS projects, often love to condescendingly assert that users are just not reading the docs, or are not smart enough to understand the software. They’re smart enough— they just don’t want to have to learn about technical implementation details for the same reason most developers are perfectly content to use personal bookkeeping apps instead of learning the best ways to organize that data and making the spreadsheets manually. Most non-technologists get no dopamine hit from solving technical problems, have no need for the requisite knowledge needed to confidently do that, and are often just trying to make the computer do what it must so they can get back to doing what they’re actually passionate and knowledgeable about. When a competing product has an interface built for people without that mental model, it would have to be pretty fucking expensive to not be a no-brainier for most nontechnical users.
I worked at a small company that had a policy of putting devs on front-line support in a rotation, both because it was too small to have dedicated support staff and because the owners wanted devs to understand how users interacted with the system better.
I can assure you that while some users merely think differently than devs, there is cohort of users who are absolutely not smart enough. It's impossible to do any amount of front-line support without collecting some horror stories.
One of my favorites is spending nearly 10 minutes trying to get someone to read a single word on their screen correctly, in a dialog box that was blocking them, containing fewer than 10 words, so I could find the cause of their problem. After nearly 30 minutes to figure out that they had a popup blocking them, and not "the computer doesn't work".
What eventually worked was getting them to spell it to me backwards. That strategy has worked out quite well in other cases too - I suspect because it avoids some of people's built-in autocorrect and dyslexia (autoincorrect).
(I honestly mostly enjoy tech support, and I've done it for many years, sometimes professionally. But some people do seem like lost causes, and are not just having a bad day)
I have experienced this in person with a developer who was failing to debug something. An error message was popping up on screen and he was reflexively clicking it away faster than anybody could read it. Even after being told “an error message is popping up, don’t dismiss it”, even after being told “[do the thing that triggers the bug] and then completely stop without doing anything else”, and a whole bunch of other ways of phrasing it, he was unable to understand that the error message contained useful information that we needed to see. I’m not even sure he was consciously aware it existed or that he was doing it. After many failed attempts at getting him to stop I literally had to take the mouse away from him and do it myself. I was shocked that apparently nothing anybody could say would stop him from dismissing the error message without even looking at it.
I think this comes from the same problem as notifications on iPhones: if you dismiss them accidentally then it is very difficult to find out what it was.
It is missing the equivalent of the "history" in e.g. browsers and YouTube.
If a user dismisses an alertbox on desktop, why isn't there an history menu item that shows the previous 100 alert messages?
As an aside I really like video games that have a running log of everything characters have said. Persona 5 does this. It's a rare feature from my experience!
That may be an issue for messages from people but almost anything that pops up because the computer wants to tell you is useless and certainly doesn't need to be findable later. If you want to work on the problem, you can do that when you're ready, at your own initiative, not in the middle of what you're actually trying to do. Programmers wouldn't stand for a language that pops up a modal dialog when you type incorrect code but we think users are somehow less deserving of respect and ready to drop everything to deal with some stupid notification telling them they did it wrong or the software is broken like a crying child demanding his mother knows that he hurt his finger.
Reflexively dismissing error message popups is reasonable behavior because they're almost always unhelpful. It is often easier to mindlessly trial-and-error your way around obstacles than waste your attention on them.
> If you want to work on the problem, you can do that when you're ready, at your own initiative, not in the middle of what you're actually trying to do.
As I explained earlier, what we were actually trying to do was debug the problem, and reading the error message was a necessary part of that.
It’s weird you’ve cooked up this little fantasy that the error message was getting in the way when it was the most important thing in the whole process and that was the entire point of the anecdote.
> Reflexively dismissing error message popups is reasonable behavior because they're almost always unhelpful.
Not when you’re trying to debug the problem the error message is telling you about!
I don't agree with much of the above but I do agree that we should endeavor to minimize error notifications and the like because people don't read them. We (as programmers) should endeavor to make things "self-heal" or work in such a way that most people don't have these kinds of notifications interrupt them. E.g. if "error X" happens a lot find a way to make the action that causes "error X" work without an error. Easier said than done though.
> Programmers wouldn't stand for a language that pops up a modal dialog when you type incorrect code
I have no idea why you think this. The only reason I wouldn't like it is because I might be doing something that requires incorrect code as a placeholder, but if the modal didn't come back after being dismissed (and just sat in a history) I'd be pleased as punch. It's why I moved to rust - I wanted the compiler to stop me.
Not only do you think this, but you think it's somehow a sign of being egotistical and disrespectful that anyone would like to know when they're screwing up. Weird.
It's so weird to me that this kind of thing wasn't a day-1 kind of thing. Android's has loads of issues too[1], not least of which is that you need to manually enable it.
1: you can't get access to actions or details in the history (e.g. no long-press to change settings), nor does it show you ones you didn't dismiss by hand afaict (I've been having Discord notifications disappearing almost immediately after making a noise, but there's nothing in history even though I saw it for its whole half-second existence because it popped over my screen).
Almost everyone has this popup dismissal reflex. People don't read them and click or tap them away instinctively. I think software creators should know this by now and stop using popups in their software.
Sometimes the reflex is so strong, it is extremely hard to stop it, even when you're aware of it. Something like that has happened to me once. There was some kind of password form, where it said DO NOT PRESS ENTER after typing the password. I pressed enter. It took me several attempts to get through it.
I'm guilty of dismissing useful messages sometimes, so I'm running a program, RetroClip for macOS, that records the last 30/60 seconds of screen capture into a ring buffer in RAM (with compression, but the CPU/GPU/power usage seems to be almost negligible). It writes out a file when you press a hotkey. Very helpful in these "wait, wtf did just happen" situations.
The person I replied to described their frustration with a colleague dismissing an error message without reading, not a user. I'm not shaming users not providing clear actionable feedback with stack traces and reproduction steps. I've known fellow software engineers throw their hands up and ask for help because they're 'getting an error', that's what's annoying (because they should know better, ok what have you done before asking me, etc.) not users.
The flip side of this is the pleasant surprise of working with a near-retirement age grandma who assures you that she "isn't technical" and "doesn't know how to use a computer", but will studiously write down every keyboard shortcut on little post-it notes and add it to their collection like they're porcelain cats she found at the Sunday markets. I've watched some of these people operate a computer in a manner reminiscent of watching an F1 driver at work, the screen just a blur as their fingers dance over the keyboard.
Absolutely, the ones that are clearly trying more than make up for the rest imo, and some are stunning. There are a lot of them. And many of the rest are just having a bad brain day and need help rubber-ducking to see the thing right in front of them - we've all been there, many times.
This sounds like "Smart person who has little technical experience and might have cognitive decline from age". The world is fully of people who's intelligence is legitimately lower than you might expect.
There were 2 typos in that sentence (the one I didn’t mention is “fully” instead of “full”). Talking about intelligence in such a sloppy manner sounded like a joke to me.
I'm not the same person, but probably. There are at least two errors in the quoted fragment, though personally I don't think either is especially indicative of a lack of intelligence.
There's a selection effect here in that smart-enough users won't bother contacting support if they work around an issue on their own, or if something is actually a non-issue for 99%+ of the user base. The ratio of usage and support contacts can be monitored. I fear a lot of devs develop unproductive mental models of the user purely from a minority sample.
That's trivially false. There's a large difference between products designed primarily to have a low learning curve, and products designed to maximize the efficiency of users that have been trained in its use.
The only products which should have any mandatory learning curve are products which actually allow an expert to do something out of the ordinarily, which simply could not be done with an easy to use product. Such as some musical instruments.
Otherwise, you can most of the time make a product which can be easy to use for novices while retaining maximum efficiency for experts.
Compare a professional trader's UI to something consumer-grade like Robinhood, or analytics UIs designed for marketers (exposing only a few cute graphs with a handful of predefined parameters) to the dashboards used in physics labs, or simple graphics programs vs. Blenders.
Maximum efficiency for experts requires removing information that would be distracting and redundant for them, but essential for novices to understand the working model of the program, so you're pretty much wrong.
Not necessarily. Interface design is a communication medium. A skilled designer can often communicate to multiple types of users solving different types of problems. When an interface is “dumbed down,” it’s usually because a non-designer was trying to ‘clean it up’ or make it pretty by removing what they didn’t need and ignoring what everybody else needs. It’s difficult, and that’s why it’s a distinct field with its own degrees and professional programs.
Sure, but whenever you can make life easier for those who have are having hard time without making life harder for those who aren't, you should do it.
For example, no power user benefits from having to use work arounds to make a product function. It's an annoyance to them, and it's an insurmountable obstacle to others.
> I worked at a small company that had a policy of putting devs on front-line support in a rotation, both because it was too small to have dedicated support staff and because the owners wanted devs to understand how users interacted with the system better.
In the 2010s Mathworks, the company that makes Matlab, had a policy that everyone started in frontline support. Including developers. (They probably still have this policy, I don't know.)
The shaping isn't necessarily productive, though. My company has a policy wherein a the dev team are on a rota to assist the support team (and by extension clients) with technical queries. The net effect has been to make me hate customers with a passion usually reserved for opposing political regimes and childhood bullies.
I wish it was just users. I once had to explain to a PM on client's side for 10 minutes that no, the software can't split $1.00 into three exactly equal invoices and we need to put that remaining $0.01 somewhere. In the end it seemed like he's given up without understanding the nature of the problem and escalated to have someone higher up to tell us to add it to the last invoice.
Well, software doesn’t exist for its own sake, the sake of the people that made it, or the sake of some kind of exclusive smartypants club. The purpose is to solve problems or accomplish tasks for people— some of whom are not cognitively gifted. A good interface will take everybody that needs it into account, including people that need less handholding if the usage is different enough.
> there is cohort of users who are absolutely not smart enough
The average IQ is 100, half of people are below that.
Being surprised that customers may be of different intelligence is the kind of thing that comes out of people who have never had to work a retail/restaurant job in high school growing up. If someone has made it that far in life before finding this out, they've lived in a bubble.
People of varying intelligence levels can operate a motor vehicle and yet software can't be designed well enough for them? The failure may be on the SWEs.
There exists a floor to how "idiot-proof" Motor vehicles are since they do require a skill test and a licensing protocol to legally operate that do weed out some number of humans not competent enough to operate them (and even beyond that insurance qualifications can weed out some more: crash or commit infractions too much and you lose and/or get priced out of your ability to legally drive). And rightly so due to the unique hazards that they pose: but for want of those things one may easily still have to try to support their software for users incapable of gainfully handling a motor vehicle.
Automobiles and the international road network have also had well over a century to standardize themselves over a glacially slowly changing set of expectations while we're writing drivers for 400GBE chipsets that only got invented last Tuesday and building agent management harnesses for styles of neural networks that literally weren't even a twinkle in the milk-man's eye yet as recently as fidget spinners being in style.
The thing is that good interface design is basically invisible, so most people, developers notwithstanding, take it for granted. In the late 90s, there were entire books published on using popular email clients like Eudora, but a literal child can figure out how to use, say, fastmail entirely through feature self-discovery, and fastmail has more features!
I also think the ego stroking borne from disproportionately high labor demand has given many developers a serious case of main character syndrome.
I think I can see where you're coming from - and it is true that there are cases of dogmatism as a defense for just sucking at UX - but I violently disagree here.
Good UX I believe doesn't mean that the implementation details are hidden, but conveyed in a way that is human-readable.
You do not hide the machine from the man, but translate between them in a way that makes neither of them invisible.
This makes for better experiences, as reality gets bound by.. well.. reality. So you don't get these weird failure modes that live in the gap between the narrative (e.g. "everything just works") and reality (e.g. "networks are always black magic").
This is also important for the user, because by having _a_ mental model (even if it is very low-res), they gain the ability to diagnose issues themselves and not be completely helpless once the magic box breaks down. They might not know exactly what to do, but the direction is very clear.
Agency is important. A lot more important than convenience. And fake convenience through frontloading short-term rewards for long-term systemic instability.
A developer sees an application as a toolkit to help them solve a problem. The more flexibility and power, the better it is. They’ve become comfortable with complex tools on the computer, over the years, because they enjoy learning about and using computers.
A nontechnical end user generally isn’t interested in operating a toolkit— they want to solve their problem, and the application claims to do that. The easier it is for them to get from problem to solution, the better.
When a developer sees a software interface, they see a palette of commands and parameters to pass to a software back end. Understanding that, and it’s implications, took years of learning and intensive usage that has blended into an imperceptible base layer of technological understanding.
To a nontechnical end user, the interface is the software. The button might as well mechanically do something. For whatever reason, often because they didn’t find it interesting, or their cognitive skillset didn’t easily adapt to it, or they just didn’t have the exposure, they didn’t learn about the basic structure of applications, and they’d be years away from understanding it enough to make decisions based on that.
Flexibility and power yields agency for technical users. It blurs obvious pathways and dampens signals for nontechnical users that just want a problem solved.
It’s difficult for experts to see things with novice eyes. That’s one of the most important things a designer can do for the software building process.
Fundamentally, interface design is a communication discipline. There’s a reason it’s a field unto itself, with its own degrees and professional organizations, and there’s a reason it’s often taught in art schools. There’s also a reason that every significant user-facing interface in your life, from your text messaging apps to the ordering kiosks in restaurants— none of which need documentation— were created by designers and not developers. Looking nice is not the point — it’s often a side effect of clear and deliberate communication, which is both difficult and important.
> Good UX I believe doesn't mean that the implementation details are hidden, but conveyed in a way that is human-readable. You do not hide the machine from the man, but translate between them in a way that makes neither of them invisible.
This is where skeuomorphism used to be king before computers ate the world. In the 90s everybody knew how a paper book worked, so document readers presented as books. Everyone knew how a tape deck worked, so audio apps presented as tape decks. Floppy disk as save icon, etc
Unfortunately, the passage of time is inexorable, and by the late 2000s we had a lot of users who had never actually seen a tape deck/floppy disk. And the whole skeuomorphic project came crashing down.
Skeuomorphism didn't fail. It feel out of fashion with designers.
We should distinguish between skeuomorphic interaction design and skeuomorphic iconography. Attempts at skeuomorphic interaction design did fail badly, I'll give you that. Document readers that expect you to turn the page by pulling at the edge of the page, mimicking a page turn in a physical book, they're terrible.
But skeuomorphic iconography works: The more detail you add to an icon, the easier it is to form mental associations with what it does - and that goes even if you don't know the original object that it's based on. Sure, a lot of people have never seen the floppy disk that the traditional Save icon is based on, making the icon less intuitive now than when it was designed. But what would you replace it with? Any alternative you might suggest is just going to be less recognisable.
> Sure, a lot of people have never seen the floppy disk that the traditional Save icon is based on, making the icon less intuitive now than when it was designed. But what would you replace it with? Any alternative you might suggest is just going to be less recognisable.
Obviously you replace it with the three stacked cylinders that symbolize a hard drive. ;D
It’s funny. The only people that regularly, seriously discuss skeuomorphism in software design are software developers. It was a big conversational topic among designers around the time Apple ditched the faux leather padding at the top of the calendar app. Developers started talking about it, I believe, because it’s an unusually concrete topic among typically abstract, nebulous, or artsy design conversations. Since then, there have been a zillion other big topics in the design world, and it’s largely considered a conceptual facet of design that’s just not very important. But developers, decades later, still discuss skeuomorphism in design like it’s one of the great important topics of the field. It’s not.
It would be like if smashing magazine put out an article in 2015 about everybody moving to a “microservices architecture” and then any time any kind of software development came up in a design forum, someone would awkwardly shoehorn the discussion into a framework of microservices vs monolithic applications. (Even better, when a developer would come along and try to give a more nuanced perspective, the designers would see themselves as the authority in the conversation because all the other designers around agreed with them.)
If you really want to dig into the nerdy conceptual side of icon design, triadic semiotics is the far more interesting rabbit hole to fall down.
This is exactly how our letters came about - 'A' originally was written sideways and represented an ox head, but now everybody just knows it as a letter.
I've seen an SD card icon used for a save icon before. I think conveniently the shape is similar enough to a floppy that you find it while scanning for it as well
Did it though? Most people young today probably never pressed a physical play/pause/stop button in their lives. Still, they get it. Some icons outlive their era, some don’t.
> In the 90s everybody knew how a paper book worked
> Did it though? Most people young today probably never pressed a physical play/pause/stop button in their lives.
It's hard to call this an example of "skeuomorphism". Those icons were introduced on physical buttons with a certain meaning that everybody had to learn. They have exactly the same meaning on software buttons; the interaction that people have with them now is the same interaction that everybody has always had with them.
This isn't a case of the software appealing to a visual metaphor that made non-metaphorical sense before the software. It was just as much of a metaphor originally as it is now. You might as well call the word "edit" a skeuomorphism in modern software because past software also had "edit" menus.
> the interaction that people have with them now is the same interaction that everybody has always had with them
Right, that was my point. What does it matter what a diskette used to be? Unless something more obvious to convey storage/saving comes along, it’s hardly “crashing down” anytime soon.
The disk icon is skeuomorphic because it's a picture of storage media. That has now gone obsolete and, instead of being skeuomorphic, it's vestigial.
Play and pause icons aren't skeuomorphic. They're symbolic. There is no point at which they were a reference to some phenomenon earlier than or other than themselves.
Play, rewind and FF icons were referring to the physical movement of tape past the play head, back when you could see the tape. Don't know what pause came from. Maybe there was a pair of felt pads that would press the tape on either side of the head to keep it tensioned while preventing movement?
The double-pipe pause symbol originates on the video side, where pausing keeps displaying a freeze-frame image, and stopping does not. Audio players had pause long before (which just causes the drive wheel to un-grip the tape), but used a variety of different symbols.
I guess even without the physical buttons you had to just learn that "play" means "engage the appropriate technical machinery".
> "[play] The meaning "to cause (a recording) to reproduce what is on it" is by 1903, probably from the "make music" sense." - https://www.etymonline.com/word/play
How did people learn the UX of a book, or a tape deck? When I was a child, sometimes I was fascinated by the fact the tape deck buttons couldn't be pressed in certain combinations, like the record button that forcibly presses play, and the fact rewind and fastforward would latch until you pressed another button. But I didn't know what half of them did.
That's one of the things that surprised me (in a positive way) about Mac OS X when I first got to use it -- it actually does indeed do lots of things in an _understandable_ and genuinely simple way. It's also clear how much work went into making the system behave in this way, it certainly wasn't an accident.
In the era of web apps and Electronification of anything I believe most of this is sadly gone, but in the older Mac OS X models you could clearly understand and see the logic behind the software and I believe it worked well for non-technical people from what I observed.
> often love to condescendingly assert that users are just not reading the docs, or are not smart enough to understand the software.
The older I get, the more annoying I find this habit in the SWE community. It's not even a well earned condescension. Software is often horrible! Physical hardware products are not put out into the world with the kind of defects that software so regularly is.
We get away with it because we say we can patch it later, though often all we do is move defects around.
It's amazing picking up pre-internet connected era electronics from 30/40/50 years ago and they just.. work.
Meanwhile software decays at a faster and faster rate each year. I am coming around to the idea of keeping air gapped old-OS machines around just to maintain pieces of software that otherwise auto-update themselves into oblivion.
Nobody reads the docs. This will be even more true soon as LLM generated docs become more popular. I once read a user report "would be nice if I could move large Xs to uncover Y", filed a bug report myself to add the feature, and then realized that feature was already added and documented months ago, by me! I just updated it with an unobtrusive prompt/instruction to the UI when relevant. I definitely get lazy sometimes, but if you don't take the extra step to make sure a feature is easily discoverable and understandable in the UI, you're wasting almost all of its potential benefit.
There's an idea in this book, that when using a mouse, smaller buttons are harder to click because you need to stop the cursor inside its hitbox, but moving the cursor to the edge of the screen is easy because it's effectively a huge button whose height is infinite (or infinite width for lateral edges). And hitting a corner is even easier because it effectively has both infinite width and height!
This means that if there is an actual, finite button on a corner, the easiest way to click it is to position the cursor on the very corner, rather than attempting to position the cursor in the middle. But this is ruined if this button has padding. So for example, the start button on windows at the bottom left corner had padding in earlier versions of windows like windows 98, but the actual hitbox of the button shouldn't have padding, so that it's easier to click.
This is all to say that I use Firefox maximized, without a titlebar or menubar, so that the "back" button is at the top left corner of the screen, and the hamburguer button is at the top right corner. But those buttons have padding! If I actually move the mouse to the very corner before clicking, I miss the button
Padding is typically part of the hitbox, margin is not. What you are describing sounds like margin to me. Especially for Firefox since their UI is made with web tech.
But besides being overly pedantic I agree with your general point. If their is a small gap between hitbox and edge of the screen it is very annoying.
But the worst thing IMO is Windows 11 windows which you can grab by the titlebar but not the content area. However often there is no visual indication of where the titlebar starts/stops.
Also, more than 90% of the title bar are active UI elements like menus and close buttons, and you have to guess which few pixels are actually inert enough to allow dragging.
Note I am not talking about the title bar (it's hidden here), I am talking about the bar where the address bar is (also back/forward/reload buttons and extension buttons)
Fixing this would require whole-system thinking. The corners of a window are nothing special. The corners of a screen are special, and exploiting that requires thinking about the screen, even though as an application developer, your responsibility stops at the window.
>so that the "back" button is at the top left corner of the screen
"Back" is used so frequently that I consider any mouse lacking a side button for "back" to be incomplete. You don't need to put a high value on your time for upgrading your mouse to pay for itself within its service life.
On the other end of that spectrum I cannot _stand_ back button on the mouse and always disable the feature immediately because it is often too easy for me to click those fiddly side buttons without meaning to (either while grabbing or while re-adjusting my hand position on the mouse)
So I usually only map middle click to such a button, as that button is at least 90% of the time relatively safe to accidentally trigger.
Middle mouse button is often mapped to "paste selection", which is dangerous to accidentally trigger. If the side buttons on a mouse are easy to trigger by accident it means they're positioned wrong. My mouse is shaped so that my thumb naturally rests slightly below the side buttons, and I have to raise it slightly to press them.
Steve Krug's other book, Rocket Surgery Made Easy, got me into usability tests with real users, and how to get it in place in a corporate environment. It's shocking to watch real users use software.
It's still a wild logical leap to me that we went from this observation, that maybe the bottom half of users never learn how the software works, to the idea that we should build software that is actively learning-hostile. In the old era, we established consistent UI patterns: this kind of button does X, this kind of button behaves like Y, here are the tools to solve your problem. Maybe not everyone learned the patterns, but those that did became wildly productive. Now: who cares if buttons are recognizable as such, your bottom half of users tap all over the place anyway, so design for them exclusively. It's good to enable more people, but we also lost something in the process.
I cynically ascribe that to a change in the market/ecosystem, from "personal computer as democratized means of production" to the (more profitable) "device we control to sell content and subscriptions to you".
The root problem is so-called startup/growth hacker culture: you start from zero user. There are a lot of potential users out there. Far more than your current users. So, the best way to grow your business is not to retain your current users, but to grab new users.
In this scenario, you only need to cater to the most clueless users. There is no need to make an app learnable as you don't even intent to keep the users long enough for them to actually learn how your app works.
In my UX jobs where we did actual UX research with participants in the office the UX research team would go around before each session and find any available developers to come with and sit behind the one way mirror to watch.
You could always tell when it was someone’s first time watching a real user attempt to use our website.
> On the other hand, a common way for regular people to interact with a system is they just... don't have a model. None at all. Like, they click a thing and see what it does, and if it doesn't do what they expect they shrug and click something else.
I suspect that's part of why fuzzing is so powerful.
> You can see this in the article: "Google Docs added some kind of delay such that the typing you do into the title box right after you open the doc gets overwritten". That's a developer forming a model of the system. The lay alternative is to simply learn that sometimes when you type in a box, the text appears. Other times, it doesn't. If it doesn't, you try again.
Things like this just infuriate me. The user just learns that things are unreliable. To me that's unacceptable for something to be presenting a text box to type text, let you type it, then wipe it out. Sometimes you have to wait a second after typing something before clicking search, or it searches for your incomplete query a half second before. I don't blame users for just concluding that typing is unreliable.
the people without a model are also the easiest users to lose, they won't file a bug or explain what broke. they'll just click twice, decide the product is unreliable and use something else. then the team sees no bug report and assumes everything is fine.
I had to give up when the first example of a "bug" that the author could see, which others are blind to, was search results.
"In some cases, people sent me their actual search results. In every such case, the search results did not contain a good result that I could see"
Software that does not meet expectations, especially in a field like search, which is basically a long running war between SEO and search engines, is not a 'bug'. That's like saying there is 'bug blindness' in the publishing industry because when I pick up a random book, it sucks, even though others think it's fine. Sure, maybe something is wrong, could even be improved, but lets save the word 'bug' for something more specific.
> the first example of a "bug" that the author could see, which others are blind to, was search results
The author explicitly says he is using less specific and compelling examples for good reasons:
> I don't want to give any specific examples where it was my job to see how well the thing worked because, even if the internal examples are meant in a constructive, blameless, way, they may not always read that way when re-posted externally, so I'll give a few less interesting and less well supported "random" examples.
I also think it's reasonable to use the term "bug" in a broad or colloquial sense. If a web server is overloaded, that isn't a bug in the strictest sense, but it sure feels like a bug to the person trying to use the website. A search engine is software, and if it fails to surface the most relevant document from its index then I'd say that counts as a bug. Also the author acknowledges this SEO spam issue, e.g. in this quote for the linked post:
> Here's a fun experiment to try. Take an open source project such as yt-dlp and try to find it from a very generic term like "youtube downloader". You won't be able to find it because of all of the content farms that try to rank at the top for that term
At what point does search quality degrade to the point where is becomes a bug?
A bug is when actual behavior does not match stated or intended behavior. If the search bears little connection to what was searched for, then it is a bug, as far as the user is concerned.
Or maybe you mean to say we should reserve the word bug for deviations that are unintentional?
For me the idea that poor quality search results are a bug muddies the idea of what a bug is. It's like saying the colour of the paint in my living room is buggy because I don't like it. It might be an ugly colour that I don't like, but it is what it is. A bug would be if the colour doesn't match what was shown on the tin.
> If the search bears little connection to what was searched for, then it is a bug, as far as the user is concerned.
So if I search for A, and I get results for B instead (where B has only the slightest connection to A), it is not a bug?
What about if B has no connection to A whatsoever? Still not a bug? If it is not, then we may have discovered a software domain (the first for me I should say) where bugs are not possible. Should a be a nice market to launch products for, then.
> So if I search for A, and I get results for B instead (where B has only the slightest connection to A), it is not a bug?
It depends. There could be a bug in the system like query = query.replace(A,B), or it could be that there are no good results for A. Returning nonsense results is a bad design, but not necessarily a bug.
I guess my underlying point is that bugs are about software not conforming to some specified behaviour, and trying to specify behaviour like "i should type in a search and get great results" is too loose of a spec to be meaningful so we should avoid saying things which don't meet that criteria are bugs. To use a concrete example, perhaps the set of search results returned for a query look useless to you but are actually useful for someone else.
Compare that with something like a calculator app where part of the spec is "Must handle integer addition with for inputs i,j where -10,000 <= i <= 10,000 and -10,000 <= j <= 10,000". Then if in your calculator you do 1+1 and get 3, then that is clearly a bug per the spec.
Bugs vs. bad design is a useful distinction to make imo.
Dan isn't necessarily Bertrand Russell so ill give him a pass for not using the perfect word in every place.
But this article is in my opinion one of the best attempts at explaining a fundamental problem in software product work that has never (in my experience) been laid out this well. I will implore you to finish it.
> Software that does not meet expectations, especially in a field like search, which is basically a long running war between SEO and search engines, is not a 'bug'.
While bug has various definitions, not meeting reasonable expectations is common to all.
> That's like saying there is 'bug blindness' in the publishing industry because when I pick up a random book, it sucks
No, because there's no reasonable expectation that a random book won"t suck.
Later on he gives an example of Blackboard software that was very disliked. So I don't see what was unique in his perspective either. To me this article is not very focused and feels mostly like rambling. The core idea that we get accustomed to bugs/quality in software we use is sound. Just the article needs streamlining or better a complete rewrite.
Responding to something from the linked Patreon post:
> Blackboard (as well as Epic and SharePoint) are classic examples of software where the user and the purchaser are different and the purchaser basically doesn’t care about the user, so you don’t expect the software to be good and it would be a bit of a surprised if the software didn’t deliver a bad user experience. But it was even more surprising to me that someone working on some of the most reviled software out there could think that the software was widely loved.
I worked briefly at Epic and the attitude there seemed to be more like "yes we know people hate Epic but they're wrong". :P People there didn't think Epic was widely liked!
(The explanations given were basically, 1. people hate Epic because their IT department configured it wrong, if they configured it in a more suitable manner they wouldn't have these problems, and, 2. it's not Epic per se that's the problem it's all EMR software, if you think Epic is bad you should see the competition, they're even worse. I'm not sure that second one is really such a good excuse, but, that was what I remember hearing.)
A close acquaintance was on Medicaid, and then got a new job and was moved off of Medicaid onto an insurance plan they were paying for. Medicaid is administered by insurance companies; the same company administered both their Medicaid plan, and the plan they were now paying for.
As it so happened, within a week of this occurring they needed urgent care, badly, no joke. We have basically three choices here (at least, which would take this insurer), and none of the three would see them, and the reason was the same in all cases: 1) they no longer had Medicaid, and 2) the provider couldn't let them pay cash and sort it out with the insurance company themselves.
It took three days calling the insurer, providers, the State health exchange, finally getting the insurer on the phone DIRECTLY with one of the providers... at a clinic rather than in admin... the insurer directly telling the clinic administrators that the person was insured and the insurance company would give them a claim number right now, or something like that... before we could get them in to see a doctor.
When we got to the clinic they looked them up and STILL told them they couldn't see them we had to demand to speak to an administrator and basically THEY COULDN'T CHECK THEM IN TO THEIR APPOINTMENT in their computer.
All of these providers used Epic. I made some additional phone calls and had some additional conversations, made a writeup, and sent it to the insurer, the benefit exchange, and the provider who ultimately saw us. Never heard anything from anyone.
Interesting topic, and funny that I personally consider the text width and font size of danluu’s blog to be a “bug”. It is well known that we can read faster with narrower text columns (remember newspaper columns when they were printed on paper). This is why I always read this particular blog with Apple’s Reader mode, which renders the text using larger font and narrower width.
also reader on ios interprets it wrong as it picks up the first heading as the article’s title, and that makes me think that it could skip some content as it’s prone to do, so back to poorly readable layout I go.
That's a cop out in this specific instance: he knows the defaults are a bug, he can change it with maybe 2x lines of CSS, but he is blind to the fact that it's a bug.
After all, he is complaining about the defaults in other software, but he is blind to the defaults he presents the user.
There is no way to specify a good size in CSS - a size that looks good on current computers will be too big on old computers, and a size that looks good on old computers looks too small on current ones. Browsers and users are the ones who can fix this.
I think your knowledge of CSS might be outdated.
What's wrong with the following CSS snippet for example?
body {
max-width: 70ch; /* Limits the text column to a comfortable reading width */
margin: 0 auto; /* Centers the text column on large screens */
padding: 1.5rem; /* Prevents text from touching the edges on small/mobile screens */
line-height: 1.6; /* Gives the lines room to breathe */
}
> What's wrong with the following CSS snippet for example?
It doesn't achieve a reasonable readable font size which was presumably the goal. Your padding won't be the right size for all screens either. (And personally I hate excessive line height).
> respect the browser's default font size
The browser's defaults are also bad. But they shouldn't be. The browser is in a position to actually fix this; the webdev isn't.
The problem is you're imposing your own idiosyncratic preferences on strangers. Your "improvements" cost valuable screen space. I paid good money for my screen space and I don't appreciate designers unilaterally wasting it because they personally think it looks better. The decision of how much (if any) space to spend on padding should be made by the user.
The designers' job is good usability. Limiting line length is important, humans cannot deal well with extremely long lines of text. This is not a matter of taste.
There is no objective definition of "extremely long". Whatever value you choose will be incorrect for some readers. Therefore the correct place to set it is in the web browser's preferences (or the window manager if you prefer).
Useful things to know, but how do they undo a designer wasting my screen space? If you're going to tell me to learn something, it should be CSS. At least Firefox can still be configured to follow its traditional role as "user agent" and allow me to override the bad decisions of designers, by setting toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets and editing chrome/userContent.css . But it would be convenient if more people used the default CSS like danluu.com .
Not sure, as I don't have any wasted screen space, due to the techniques mentioned above. On really bad sites I try reader view first, View/Page Style/No Style (on Firefox) second, and if that doesn't work I close the tab. Pretty rare though.
I once asked my brother in law (a mechanic) to help me look over and buy a new secondhand car. The car we ended up buying had good fundamentals, low cost, good brand, big trunk, high top speed.
After owning it for a while, I came to learn that it was not a great car. Things constantly broke and the repairs cost me more overall than the cost of the car. A complete disaster.
I came to realise that to a mechanic, little problems like an old fuel pump or poorly maintained engine were "easy" problems to fix. To my brother in law, what mattered was the low price and the fundamentals. Repairs, to him, were easy. To me (not a mechanic) they were expensive and inconvenient.
I think, for a developer, problems with software are a bit like this. Little things that are easy to fix can be overlooked because the grand design of the system is very clever or it has some advantage over other software like handling a particular file format, or processing a high volume of transactions.
Personally, I find it very difficult to sit down and expend the attention and effort to really look at and test my own software. I think because every little issue that I see becomes another job, another hassle, another delay in releasing. Maybe thats my "Bug Blindness", not sure if it's the same.
That is the reason why too many nerds recommended Linux as a "easy" windows alternative. What for us is easy to fix and often not even worth thinking about it, is impossible for a normal person.
Maybe? I think you may be underestimating how many papercuts of the same kind are there on Windows and on Macs. They're just harder to see when you're used to them.
Having giving support with windows and linux - I don't think so.
Recently things got way better with hardware support - but just making a printer work, used to be a unsolvable problem for my dad for example, who has a electro engineering background (but doesn't speak english, and error messages in linux are very seldom localized). In windows he put in the CD that came with the printer and it worked.
For the longest time, I had far more trouble getting printers to work in Windows (where I had to download a driver and hope that it worked right, and sometimes the only drivers offered were the ones for a different version of Windows than I had) than on Linux (where I just plugged in the USB cable and voila, the printer was autodetected). And I mean over a decade.
Since Windows 7 or so, I have seen the ease of installing a new printer driver in Windows rise to the level that Linux had always been at in my experience (I realize other people's experiences have differed). But it was shocking to me how easy Linux printing was for so long, vs how much I struggled when I had to install a Windows printer driver.
Yeah well, I don't usually print anymore, but just recently I did try to connect a printer that worked flawlessly on windows did not worked on my linux devices out of the box - and then I decided I rather do other things than printer troubleshooting.
As a contra-anecdote, my wife is not very interested in tech and has a Linux laptop for home use and a Windows laptop for work use. For both of them any attempt to use the printer is cursed. I think that's just printers for you :)
No, when they hit a problem with Windows, they blame Microsoft and/or their hardware. When they hit a problem with Linux, they blame the person that recommended it to them.
I'm with danluu on this, at least as far as the headline, and not actual details.
I run into 10 to 20 software bugs a day (feels like more). If it wasn't for the all the private data I'd leak I sometimes wish I could just put my phone and computer on screen capture for a week, with input data (keyboard/mouse/touchpad/screen) and then come back and post the 100 bugs I hit that week.
I've run into the MacOS one mentioned, getting a black screen on opening the lid. I've also run into iOS Camera app failing to open the camera. I've run into the iOS keyboard only using 80% of the width of the phone (all the keys smaller). No idea how to fix that. Closing the keyboard and re-opening does not. And killing the app, whatever app, is out because I'm in the middle of filling out a form and don't want to have to start over. I've had the phone's screen freeze quite often recently, no response to any finger presses. Locking and unlocking the phone recovers. This one is new (started happening 1-2 weeks ago)
Common/not-common. Any app that uses the phone camera to scan things (checks/ids) almost always fails in one way or another. Doesn't recognize the thing or times out like the only way they tested was in perfect conditions in their office and never tried with real users.
> I've also run into iOS Camera app failing to open the camera.
wow, you just reminded me.
From time to time I bring up the camera app, and I just get a blurry screen. I have to lock the phone and unlock it, maybe quitting the camera app before I get the camera app coming up showing what the camera sees.
I just worked around it and got on with my life and didn't yak-shave (search for a solution or file a bug)
For me, pulling out a camera I expect to work to take a shot and missing the shot because the thing I was trying to take a photo/video of was over before I could get that camera to work is a the defintion of broken.
>I've run into the MacOS one mentioned, getting a black screen on opening the lid.
this is similar to what happens to me, if the screen goes dark to save battery and I move it to start back up too quickly, like within a couple of seconds, it will crash and restart.
So sometimes I see it is going to go dark and I move to stop it but it goes dark a microsecond before I touch the touchpad and then everything needs to start up again.
I also think it's due to normalization of deviance, people are just used to it..
- You can't build a model, because everything will be changed with the next update, so, even if not consciously, people won't do it, why bother learning something that's not going to be of any use next time you use the application.
- because you basically don't know how anything works, it's a coin toss whether it's actually not working, or you're just "using it wrong".
- most things won't do the thing you expect of them consistently, so you don't expect anything of them.
Last night, I uploaaded some documents to my insurance company => modal:
>I thought this had something to do with how I use computers but, over time, I've realized that it's mostly that people are hitting the same bugs and don't notice.
I suspect I know why they do not notice. See below.
>it works well, etc., but when I open up the thing and try it, it's in a state where the thing only works if you do quite a few non-intuitive workarounds.
I suspect most people are so inept at navigating UI because even a good UI is not intuitive to them. A bad UI is equally not intuitive. They do not know it is a bug because everything is a bug to them.
I can use a novel UI and figure out where to find what I need to do very quickly. In my experience with lay people, they can use the software for a decade longer than me and still not understand some of the capabilities and navigate to utilize them as I can within a few minutes or small amount of research.
>I suspect most people are so inept at navigating UI because even a good UI is not intuitive to them. A bad UI is equally not intuitive. They do not know it is a bug because everything is a bug to them.
This seems a weird thing to believe given that we know there are such things as black UI patterns designed to keep users from doing things they might want to do, but which the company might not want they do yet still are obliged to provide the possibility of doing.
As a general rule I think I am pretty good with finding out things about software, for example in pretty much every company I've worked at I'm one of the only devs who learns Jira's query language, and how to make my own dashboards to organize things, but I do at times experience UIs that I either must believe are malicious or buggy, and I stand by that interpretation no matter how they people who work at the company like to claim it is working as intended.
But I have also experienced some times when I think the way this UI works must be a bug, because otherwise the people who designed it must be incompetent idiots and also, given laws about accessibility requirements, potentially on the hook for some monetary payments in court soon.
My interpretation has been that I am often to quick to think things are bugs and not worthwhile using because I am familiar with how buggy things can be and still "work" somewhat, and also that normal uneducated users will try to soldier through things I just give up on because they don't realize that a thing should not be working the way it does, they think it is them that are wrong - as evidently you do as well. I think it is frankly a strange viewpoint to have in the world of software development, which world I assume you are a part of?
>I just give up on because they don't realize that a thing should not be working the way it does, they think it is them that are wrong - as evidently you do as well. I think it is frankly a strange viewpoint to have in the world of software development, which world I assume you are a part of?
I agree with, "They think it is them that are wrong", essentially. The end users that I deal with at the consumer level usually think they messed up when something does not do what they thought it was going to do.
>as evidently you do as well. I think it is frankly a strange viewpoint to have in the world of software development
Can you elaborate on this statement? I do not know whether you are agreeing with me and implying we are both strange or you are implying that I think that way and that is strange. Either way, I am not a developer, yet. I dabble in things.
I think, knowing that dark ui patterns exist - which I called black ui patterns by mistake earlier, I unfortunately very tired the last few days - and given the assumption I made that you knew something about how often bugs can actually come about, that thinking the users are to blame is very weird.
The users who don't know how often bugs occur and so forth always think that it is them to blame, but people who know about bugs and how things are made should probably think otherwise, but it seemed the way you phrased your initial post that you are in agreement that it is the fault of the users for whom the UI is always nonsensical and who never put in the necessary amount of effort to understand the UI.
This is rather interesting to read. But it reinforces something I've seen in my career. The majority of users of software I've helped build, they use it in ways that are mind bending to me. Workflows I would never think of, that somehow do what they need.
The second one is most software contains bugs. Users that expect to get things done simply choose workflows to avoid the worst consequence of those bugs very quickly.
> The second one is most software contains bugs. Users that expect to get things done simply choose workflows to avoid the worst consequence of those bugs very quickly.
I feel like a substantial source of everyday irritation are bugs like this in bad software. It’s frustrating that devs just don’t care.
You could make software that doesn’t require your users to work around its shortcomings.
Blackboard is definitely a really strong contender for the worst software I've ever had to use. When I was in uni, I went so far as to write an alternative that scraped the content from blackboard and published it on a site that I could actually browse sensibly.
They were paying exorbitant amounts of money for the license too.
Applications like Blackboard exist because of the genre of "Checkboxware."
A University must comply with Laws and Regulations X, Y, Z, P, D and Q and a host of other regulations the University never heard of and Blackboard went through the process to "comply" with those checkboxes. So, if you deploy Blackboard, you tick all the checkboxes automatically.
The fact that Blackboard was a garbage content management system and a terrible grade recording system was irrelevant--because the "better" systems wouldn't check the boxes.
(I say this as someone who, as a lecturer, had to manage the account logins, mailing list, and Subversion source control system for an entire class. I only ever put grades that needed to be "secure" into Blackboard. I did all that because I HATED Blackboard that badly, but it was a LOT of work. And I probably wouldn't have passed any significant security audit; although my accessibility ratings should have been excellent since everything was plain text and plain HTML)
It's not really regulation-driven. It's just what happens when the people buying software and the people using it are different. This is the standard problem of enterprise software is marketed to the IT department (which cares about cost, box-checking, vendor relationships, lock-in risk, bureaucratic turf wars, headcount preservation, SLAs, etc) with little or no regard for responsiveness to end user needs.
It is definitely true though that enterprise software for nonprofits (like education) sucks even harder than usual, because nonprofit IT departments don't even have the profit motive to align IT department and end user interests.
Users don't choose their university by how good that university's software is (just as we don't choose apartment complexes and power companies this way). This gives university IT no incentive to deploy software that doesn't suck.
Banks and cellphones also used to work this way, until they suddenly didn't, which was quite a shock to the existing players in the market.
Part of it is also that universities mostly already tried building their own bespoke software in the 90s using 90s era technology and development practices, and got bitten by ending up with legacy software that they couldn't afford to maintain.
Our brain is geared towards efficient signal processing, and is actively working to delete signals it deems "unnecessary". It wants us to notice only the new and the unexpected; that's why after a short while you don't notice the same smell or the same recurrent noise. They are just ignored as "already detected / not new".
The reason for this may be evolutionary (although we don't know what traits were the most effective to help us survive in the wild); but there is a very practical reason to ignore signals, which is that there's so may of them: if we did process every data sent from every sensor and thought about odors, light, temperature, noise, etc. then we would be overwhelmed and could not do anything else.
That's also why we usually don't "see" things or people: we identify them. We don't see faces, we simply identify Alice or Bob. Which in turn explains why most people can't draw: the concept of Alice can't be drawn; to draw Alice we need to actually follow the features of her face. Being an artist means being able to unlearn (or disable) that identification process.
And I think the reason most people don't see bugs is similar: they're not interested, all they want is to get something done. If there's a simple workaround that makes the thing work, then that's good enough; all the rest is irrelevant. This is not bias or benevolence: this is efficiency.
Parts of this reminded me pleasantly of one of my favorite John Regehr posts, "Operant Conditioning by Software Bugs" https://blog.regehr.org/archives/861
This reminds me of my first job, where we did a lot of 3d modeling and mobile robotics research. When we were trying to reproduce motion bugs, a coworker of mine would track down our manager and put him at the controls. More times than not, the bug would surface and it'd trip our logging and we tracked it down.
I asked him why he does this. His explanation was really built on this operant conditioning idea: "we use this stuff for 8 hours a day and we train ourselves to avoid all of its little pitfalls. So I get the most available person who hasn't used it all day, which is our manager. He uses it differently than we do because he doesn't avoid all of its little problems. But if we have a really tricky problem, I get our manager's manager. I don't know if you've ever seen him try to use an xbox controller, but he has the spatial reasoning abilities of a goldfish. He's never failed to reproduce a really hard bug. If I ever needed an Einstein-level bug reproduction, I'd track down the head of the department and put him in front of it, but it's never come to that.
Reminds me of watching my wife use her computer. I'd help her with something and realize all the little things more regular computer users just put up with. Incorrect focus, focus stealing, windows popping up behind current windows, unclear window styling, invisible scrollbars, moving page elements, unclear instructions, the list goes on and on and on.
Unreal Engine is like this. You stab your toe about a thousand times for the first few months. Eventually you lean to stop pushing the buttons that crash.
"Time passed, and they resented the defects no longer. The defects had not been remedied, but the human tissues in that latter day had become so subservient, that they readily adapted themselves to every caprice of the Machine. The sigh at the crises of the Brisbane symphony no longer irritated Vashti; she accepted it as part of the melody. The jarring noise, whether in the head or in the wall, was no longer resented by her friend. And so with the mouldy artificial fruit, so with the bath water that began to stink, so with the defective rhymes that the poetry machine had taken to emit. All were bitterly complained of at first, and then acquiesced in and forgotten. Things went from bad to worse unchallenged."
For what it’s worth, the author would not consider this a bug. He does it (as I understand) because he distrusts the research on the impact of line length on readability.
"I easily observe hundreds to thousands of bugs per week"
which should be rewritten as
"I easily observe hundreds to thousands of things that I consider to be bugs per week"
which is to say that the "bug" is in the eye of the beholder. It seems the author stretches the definition of "bug" to include cases where something functions, but in a manner that is open to improvement or not to his taste.
I had this same discussion on another HN thread a while back. I prefer lines to run as long as possible; I find it difficult/distracting to move my eyes to the beginning of the next line every few seconds. I'm sure I'm in the minority, but I have to believe I'm not the only one out there who feels this way.
Rather than having the website author wrap lines at a width that works for the average user or use case (which may only be optimum for a percentage of users or use cases, which may not include me), the user can simply make their browser whatever width they prefer the lines to wrap at. This way, everybody gets to choose what works for them.
To some degree, yes. Not to the point that I can't or won't do it, but I would certainly prefer books to be printed much wider. I can mitigate some of the issue by keeping my index finger along the left margin as I read, so I have a better idea of where my eyes need to jump to the next line. That technique is impossible with my computer screen, which is more than arm's length from me.
Part of the issue is that I read fairly quickly, so I find myself spending a relatively large percentage of my time skipping to the next line, and it's that frequent context switching that is annoying.
The bad text formatting in printed works (including the bizarre decision to sacrifice useful vertical position cues ("ragged right") to imitate the technique medieval scribes used to reassure their patrons they weren't wasting valuable parchment ("full justification")) is a big reason why I avoid them whenever possible.
I'm in the same boat as kmoser. I don't like narrow text lines either.
In my experience, books are mostly OK, as long as they don't split up the text in columns. Magazines and newspapers often do have columns that are much narrower than I would like.
I am in the same boat as GP, and I wonder if it's one of the reasons I migrated hard to ebooks and online magazines/newspapers as soon as that became possible and never looked back.
Making the browser windows narrow is a bad suggestion. Because most websites have some sort of navigation bar on the left and another bar on the right, so we need a wide enough window to get enough of the main text (width).
There are very few websites without those columns.
Surely between the browser window too wide (where the text lines are too long) and the browser window too narrow (where side bars are hidden) there exists a width that is exactly to your liking.
The point is that most websites have sidebars, but this one doesn't.
Let's say my preferred text width is 10 units. Due to sidebars, most websites require a browser window width of 20 units to show me 10 units of main text.
Then I visit this person's website and get text 20 units wide and it's very uncomfortable to read.
The text width I like doesn't change but the browser window width I need does change, and I don't want to change it when navigating around, to be honest.
I guess I could use the browser functionality to inject my own CSS rules for specific websites, then I could change the single-column no-max-width websites to show me a sensible text width.
But I also suppose that I'm not alone with this preference. I believe there have been studies about a suitable line length that is easy to read, and this is reflected in printed media. So those websites ask everyone to make such changes. That doesn't seem right.
I do - I much prefer using computers with only one window visible. And use all the keyboard shortcuts (tab, window and desktop switching) to rapidly change what the thing it shows is.
I reckon there's something interesting about human variety in focus and/or visual processing this tells!
I, on the other hand, use the keyboard shortcuts to adjust the browser width to achieve the desired line width and line start, because even when the web page takes care to set these, it varies from site to site and rarely is what I want. (For sites I visit often, I use window manager automation to auto-adjust the browser window size.)
I don't see that as a code-bug but a difference in implied requirements. Namely, the expectation about which person can/should choose the width of the lines everyone had to read.
Let's flip it around: Suppose someone put in code/markup to prevent any viewer from picking a larger or smaller font-size. Would that be "just fixing a bug", or would some of us be pissed that the author has dictated something in a way which infringes on our autonomy and disrespects our superior-knowledge about what constitutes our good reading experience?
Those habitual mitigations go a long way. Just like there is defensive programming, there is defensive usage.
Under Windows: Don't put your files into "My Documents" or similar folder hierarchies; you never know if old software will correctly deal with the abstraction.
Working with files in general: Avoid nonstandard unicode names or long paths so your external hard drive doesn't choke on them. Avoid case sensitivity even when it is allowed on Unix systems, since you can't assume Windows won't ever touch them. Avoid whitespaces in names because sooner or later, some script won't escape them.
On the internet: Never draft long comments in the browser; always use a local text file. Anything can happen in the browser.
In games: Never save your game during what looks like a complex scripted scene even if the game does allow saving.
Using search engines: Avoid keywords that are likely to confuse/distract the search.
With dropbox-likes: Give it some time to sync even after the icon is green; god knows what is being predictively shortcutted under the hood.
Everywhere: Restart the program or system if certain signs of corruption appear. You don't know what's going wrong, but you know something is, and barring some unusually careful compartmentalization, a piece of software is still a state machine which, once it has strayed from the right path, cannot be trusted at all. OSes nowadays are adapted to this, but much of software is not, and you do not want to have it corrupt your file.
>And, sometimes, the issues are severe, to the point where one might even say the thing actually doesn't work.
>I find this last category a bit mysterious, as when I look up discussions on how the thing got into this state ...
I'm currently on the dev side of such a product and can tell you one way it can end up like this.
Leadership decides a new feature is required, but refuses to commit to writing what they want. Through a bunch of meetings and calls developers have learned a number of vague requirements to the product, many which are conflicting, just as many are unclear if they are long term features or needed immediately.
The result is something that implements - to the letter, but not the spirit - of what the developers can agree on from this vague mountain of requirements.
The feature is returned to leadership in the hopes that having something tangible will make it clear what leadership actually wants.
However, leadership returns with a "Looks great, can you add?" and they sign off and we begin the next sprint.
While I agree on the fact, this is the typical case where you need a business analyst in between to 'translate' that requirement and confront the leadership if it is unclear.
If you mean that leadership IS the business analyst, then you are in trouble :D
My absolute favorite bug is the one where the “cancel your Amazon Music subscription” is seemingly the only one of what must be tens of thousands of UI elements in the Amazon app that simply loads a blank white screen no matter what.
If a website won't let you cancel, call your bank to force them to block the payment. This will cost the website $20 and a ding on their credit report. Be aware the website will ban you, so you'll need to make a new account.
Which is exactly why Amazon can get away with it. I’m not going to get permabanned from what is essentially a utility in the western world in 2026 by going nuclear with a credit card chargeback.
Sounds like credit card sites. Most everything is pretty creaky; “redeem rewards” is broken or offline for maintenance; “pay bill” is greased lightning all the way through.
I've noticed exactly the opposite with other kinds of lenders. Refinancing and renegotiation is optimized to the hilt, but the payments system seems to have an SLA of zero 9s.
One of the things I love about reading a bug report for a bug I've experienced is the feeling of solidarity it gives, a sort of "wow, me too, I thought I was the only one". I immediately recognized this issue, for example:
> when opening a new Google Doc, I used to immediately put the title I wanted into the doc. At some point, maybe ten years ago or so, Google Docs added some kind of delay such that the typing you do into the title box right after you open the doc gets overwritten, so I now have this habit where, after opening a Google Doc, I do something else and then I change the title.
I seriously doubt Google is going to do anything about this behavior, though.
It’s interesting the author ponders what they might be missing now. it seems like it’s the deterioration of the writing due to llms. I’ve liked some of the authors posts in the past. And might look in more detail at the differences between the old posts and new ones because it could be a great example for what to watch out for when using llms for writing and maybe coding.
There weren’t any concrete examples of bugs besides the Google Docs issue. Like what was so bad about blackboard (I also remember thinking it was terrible). There was a link to a great article about search but again no specific example here.
There are a lot of words but not a ton of new information. Maybe I’m just bias against llms, this could have been written entirely without then for all I know.
I usually agree with this sentiment. I have a general disdain for elaborations and novelization. Get to the point! Give me the necessary facts and make it concise!
In this case for some reason, I disagree. This post is engaging for me. I sometimes elaborate on how I came to a conclusion because that journey is equally as fascinating as the conclusion itself. While reading this authors post I was happy to see what seems like a very thorough thought process.
It was actually refreshing for me to see someone write at such length and find myself engaged.
It worked for me.
Now, putting my self in your shoes, as I have regularly had the same opinion, I have more empathy and understanding for how people consume and enjoy writing.
If you think a bit, you'll notice that it's long but it's not padded for content length. It does not repeat the same thing 100 times with different wording. Every "bug" he talks about is somewhat different.
>Almost nobody objected to my characterization of Google and Bing search results, but people told me that I was wrong about Kagi. In some cases, people sent me their actual search results. In every such case, the search results did not contain a good result that I could see (e.g., for the seasonal forecast query, the search failed to return an up-to-date seasonal forecast) and was full of SEO spam. In one case, a person passed me both their list of Kagi filters as well as the search results they got without making claims that the results were good or bad, but people generally insisted the results were good even though the results both failed to link to a useful result and were full of spam except in cases where the user did something like pin GitHub to the top of their results, which worked for the queries where the goal was to download software that's hosted on GitHub, but of course completely fails for the other queries from the post.
This deserves to be a separate post. Kagi would be great if it were 10x less expensive. For the price that is paid, the very first click should deliver the answer or most relevant information to the search with five nines accuracy. Clicks that require a user to perform more digging or are simply rejected as spam should come with some SLA of 0.0001%
Unfortunately we won't get a chance to see whether kagi could make it work before SEO was a thing, so this isn't a fair comparison.
(Not defending kagi necessarily, I've never tried it, no opinion on how it fares on today's Internet but comparing it to how 1999 Google did on the 1999 internet is absurd)
I do think a lot of these are not Bug Blindness, but a bar for acceptable quality standards.
A low bar means people walk past without realising it, a medium bar may take notice but it doesn't bother them and tends to get throw out within min or seconds. A high bar gets insane irritation that some may even call OCD.
And unfortunately, these spectrum follows an S curve. If you have a high bar, you are likely in the single digit percentage monitory. And the same is across all things not just software.
I've met with this attitude before. It's when developers interpret the function of QA to exclusively search for the situations where the expected functionality and actual don't match. They would reject anything coming from QA saying that the expected functionality is wrong.
So... do we restrict the meaning of the word "bug" only to the mismatched (developers') expectations, or do we extend it to cover bad expectations too? I'm in the later camp, because I'm not aware of even a single company that has any department or a process that would systematically address the existence of bad expectations. And, if anyone should be given the power to act on it, the QA seems to be the most likely candidate.
> So... do we restrict the meaning of the word "bug" only to the mismatched (developers') expectations, or do we extend it to cover bad expectations too?
Good thoughts and framing, thank you for that. I think I'm in the former camp, because I think fixing bad expectations is a matter of thoughtful redesign that should follow a slightly different process to fixing bad implementations (what I would call a bug). Not every issue in a program is a bug, and that has nothing to do with the importance or urgency to fix the issue.
Assuming a rigid product organization, I think developers _should_ ask testers to escalate "works according to spec" even if the spec is unreasonable. Otherwise developers might be torn between QA, UX, and architects fighting about how something should or shouldn't work. At least for me, finding myself in such a position is a recipe for excessive meetings and losing focus on other equally important matters.
I am in latter camp. Although I also agree with you on >escalate "works according to spec".
But let me use Steve Job's phase, "you must start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology".
A bug to developers is work according to spec, but a bug to a user is that is it has mismatched expectations. And it really should be someone's job to make sure this is corrected. But as parent said, there hasn't been one in most if not all companies.
And perhaps that is what makes old Apple such a success. They have a low pay $1 dollar salary beta tester to test out literally everything.
Haha it’s just that the things these devices enable for us are so valuable. But life is full of suboptimal things just because that’s how it is. Some other constraint causes it.
I was at Oren’s Hummus years ago with a friend and I remember thinking that there was this heat lamp outside by the window that was very close to the glass. We were halfway through our meal when we heard a loud snap and a large crack formed in the glass. Error in process, my failure to report it, and costly consequence. Bug, eh?
It’s just that the world is full of detail and things are full of interactions. And complexity is something we’re all constantly grappling with.
Every time I do the 5 finger gesture to bring up launchpad (I think that’s what it’s called) on a Mac the text field doesn’t focus fast enough for the text. Every time I type then backspace backspace backspace and type again. That’s just life. Somewhere someone shipped something that does this. It didn’t use to be this way but it is now. I can’t really change it so I just live with it.
The world of software is complexity upon complexity created from the fact that the virtual world admits arbitrary amount of interaction at much lower cost than the physical world. Yep, the world is full of bugs. But you really have to care a lot to stop them and no one really wants to pay you to do that.
Great post. Pins the tail on the donkey. As a lifelong Unix and Linux user, when I was forced to use Windows at work, this kind of thing struck me profoundly. Windows users just didn't notice how crippling the whole experience was. They'd write it off as "user error" when Word autocapitalized strings weven if auto caps was turned off, things like that, similar to "natural running motion".
Same for Linux and MacOS users. Fans are blind to their own OSes problems because they've become blind to its issues or gotten used to the workarounds. I use all 3, I run into issues on all 3 all the time.
Sure, but they're not the standard business operating system that the world economy depends on. We in the USA let Microsoft have a monopoly essentially because of this.
I think having my career be started in testing has broken my brain. Having seen so many different failure scenarios, it makes actual development difficult. Failure handling in particular is exceptionally difficult, especially when you're hitting low level filesystem errors.
If you can't write to the filesystem, almost everything you do in an embedded system will fail. So you can't undo a partial write. Your logging will probably fail too.
A relatively big database (a tier 2/3 database) that I was using handled this in a really bad manner: it'd just segfault. Depending on when this happened you could get data corruption and never be able to open the DB even in read-only mode.
It's one of the core principles of a database! And it didn't even do that correctly.
From the article: “For well over a decade, the reliability data that exists (and I think this is backed up by the anecdotal experience that mechanics who work on Volvos have) is that Volvo reliability is mediocre to poor, but of course Volvo forums are full of people who insist that Volvos are among the most reliable cars and that the data are all wrong.”
The author mentions one explanation, which is that most people driving a Volvo won’t experience a breakdown (and then generalize from that). Another one is of a very different kind known as post-purchase cognitive dissonance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance#Consumer_...).
A mistake that both Dan and the forum users made, was to discuss averages instead of reliability for certain platforms and/or engine types. Most manufacturers have models with wildly different reliability.
I’m really anal about the Quality of my own software, and tend to be hard on others’ software (doesn’t make me too popular).
> I've had multiple jobs where directors/VPs/execs/etc. sometimes ask me to evaluate something when they want an actual opinion from someone who is relatively likely to notice issues (and fix them or drive fixes for them if necessary).
I’ve had the experience where I need to be asked, and even then, if my opinion isn’t “ist güt,” it’s often ignored.
When someone makes a proposal, I tend to immediately see the potential issues, and used to point them out, and suggest workarounds or mitigation strategies, without being asked.
Not the happy path. I get accused of being “negative,” my suggestion is shitcanned, and I’m shunned.
I’ve learned to just keep my mouth shut, and if the situation calls for it, start quietly preparing for when the wheels fall off.
I have also learned to never say “I told you so,” as that is a petty and vindictive statement. Doesn’t help at all.
I feel for you and I'm similar too. However, there's a fine line between what you are describing and "perfect is the enemy of the good". I've seen some who claim to be like you but in practice they are a net negative to everything because they can never agree to anything until it is perfect even when the perfect solution is beyond the capabilities and/or out of project scope/budget and/or take too long to implement ignoring business needs.
But there’s a lot of room between “perfect,” and the "quality" of most of today’s tech, and I worked for a company that routinely shipped gear that had a very high level of Quality.
I’ve watched people use “Perfect is the enemy of good” to justify shipping absolute garbage.
> When someone makes a proposal, I tend to immediately see the potential issues, and used to point them out, and suggest workarounds or mitigation strategies, without being asked.
> Not the happy path. I get accused of being “negative,” my suggestion is shitcanned, and I’m shunned.
Absolutely right. People come up with some of the most idiotic ideas, but you aren't supposed to point out the obvious flaws. These 'ideas' create a lot of jobs and success stories. The purpose of a system is what it does. Everyone wants to build an empire and they need more and more headcount, which means incredibly shitty ideas, and tons of people working on them. Everyone claims success and moves on to the next shitty idea next year for more success. Thats why, even if AI can make developers more productive, it doesn't really matter, the vast majority of projects in bigcorp are bad ideas. If your bad ideas go faster, doesn't mean it increases revenue or profit. It only helps the people involved to claim more 'success'. Now, with AI.
Long ago I realized I had the ability to see race conditions in source code, at least more easily/accurately than others on average. It was helpful when reviewing the code of others, esp more junior. And I once briefly considered getting a custom T-shirt made with the words "I see race conditions." (in the spirit of the famous scene from The Sixth Sense with "I see dead people.") and wearing it to the office during formal code review meetings. But a friend talked me out of it when he pointed out it might get misinterpreted as being something racist rather than having to do with threading and concurrency.
The whole "I see bugs where others do not" reminded me of that same phenomenon.
I've had to live with shipping software with really poor quality that had loads of small bugs. My Product Manager forced me to. However, at the end, the customers seemed happy, and I have to admit that I was partially wrong.
The QA guys flushed out the big bugs and many of the small ones. Without any proof, I imagine something like 99% of the customers would hit only a few bugs, that they are used to compensate for (reloading pages etc), leading to a view of the product as having good quality. I was wrong: the sw quality is poor, but the percieved quality is good. I would of course prefer to do sw of much better quality.
Matches my experience. I think that 98% of the people that used our software were using only 2-3 battle-tested happy paths, and just never hit any bugs, not because there weren't any (there were hundreds of bugs in JIRA spanning 3+ years of development) but simply they didn't trigger the non-hot code path ever.
The software was crap, but it made money, so it wasn't crap.
That is something that should be obvious to any developer who worked with a real QA-team or person. They just have a different mindset.
The problem with contemporary software development is not only that often the majority of QA work is shifted left (meaning to the existing devs) but also that the developer mindset is contagious. Have QA-people, who are usually in the minority, work too long and too closely to the devs and they become blind.
I worked in V-model teams where the only communication between the development team and QA-team was supposed to be the spec. I still think that is the best way to develop software that works.
I choose tools I use, configure them, report bugs, and occasionally contribute fixes. But when I can't, I work around them, yet never get used to the workaround.
"Habitual mitigation" does not happen in me, and it's partly intentional.
I have created bad software in the past, but when I saw how people work with it, I could not be proud. Learned to look at software like a user, and don't want to unlearn that.
I believe (or maybe I hope) software will be democratized and people will start to demand good software.
> On the topic of Michael's comment, I think it's easy for programmers to not notice ads. Almost all programmers I know use an ad blocker and, in real life, their eyes seem to just skim over ads and not notice them.
How do you write this article and not notice that this should be the topmost example of people adapting to buggy software that doesn't at all work for its users without workaround cognitive hacks?
Banner blindness has been studied since a few years after ad banners were invented and advertisers started getting pissy they didn't magically triple their revenue, heh
Just a general pitch - please everyone use LLMs more to fix bugs and polish software to make it better for users.
It feels like too much of the benefit from it has been optimising, rushing new features/markets, tripping over ourselves with new processes, vibe coding things just for ourselves. When maybe it could actually make things better for most people using software in their daily lives.
I find the ad blindness and bug blindness similar but on opposite ends: I also notice bugs easily, but I also notice ads (instead of skimming — when ad blockers do not work or apply), yet I consciously make an effort to not be tricked and sometimes explicitly decide to not buy the product if the ad is obnoxious or really abuses the psychological findings for business' gain.
Hah in the AI era I noticed the agents are worse than the average person at noticing bugs. Agents use their own scale to decide if something is a success even if the output is broken. Agents are bug-blind to their own work. The consequence is that spotting bugs is now the key reviewer skill. The human’s job shifts to catching what the agent is blind to in its own work.
I want to use some of this guy's software to see how amazingly bug free it is, lol. This is weapons grade hubris & probably autism.
Although I do have to agree with him about Linguist. I also have a PR that was reviewed and then just never merged, despite multiple very polite prompts over several years.
That's not what the term "backfire effect" refers to. The term "backfire effect" refers specifically to one specific consequence of this; namely, it refers to the idea that presenting evidence against something can make people more likely to believe it. (And my understanding is that in later studies this "backfire effect" appears to not actually exist after all, as Wikipedia appears to back up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belief_perseverance )
I'm not sure what the term is for what you're referring to, although it's certainly a real and known effect.
I feel cursed with the opposite of this. I can't seem to go 12 hours without finding a bug in software which it's not my job to test. It's all so awful. I waste a lot of time trying to figure out how to report these bugs, because they offend me.
Just once I'd like to believe, for a little while, that this industry has produced something worth being proud of.
This hits. Ive had an annoying issue with Codex VS Code extension for weeks if not months when queuing up a follow up. Often it just disappears, I think it's just a UI glitch is actually queued but I can't click steer if the UI doesn't update and I find myself automatically going CMD+A, CMD+C before sending a follow up message.
> At times, I've tried to see if I can get a job somewhere where I just fix quality issues all day. This has never panned out, due to some combination of this not being a very high priority and it also not being a normal role that companies have a role for.
I'm pretty sure dedicated QA roles are a thing at many companies.
Ok, but who do you think fixes the bugs? There must be countless devs out there who are slaves to fixing Jira tickets all day, so I still don't understand OP's assertion that full-time bug fixer isn't a thing.
What I see a lot is working with developers who believe the goal is to write software that can complete the task.
They demo it, release it and watch it immediately fall apart with first contact with the user.
What they should be doing is having a goal of software that cannot fail to complete the task.
I also see bugs others, especially developers, are blind too. I've wasted I'm not sure how many hours reporting bugs to unresponsive companies and teams. Often the problem is not only that the developers cannot see or believe the bugs, but that there is no channel for reporting them. Even many open source projects resist receiving and addressing bug reports submitted by users. Commercial companies actively shield developers from users to the point where 9-figure customers have to escalate to a VP (who they can actually talk to because they're a hundred-million dollar customer) to get action on a serious bug affecting them, instead of just emailing the SWE 3 who's ultimately going to make the one line fix after the message gets passed down through many layers of emergency meetings.
When I worked at Google, it was at least possible to report bugs internally with some hope they would be addressed. Sometimes you could even fix them yourself, given enough time and the relevant skills. Bug bankruptcy was still a thing. Teams would simply throw away all the SWE-years that had gone into documenting and reporting issues in their systems. But there was some possibility you'd get action, at least if you were a squeaky enough wheel and used the right back channels. But now that I'm outside the plex, there's basically no mechanism to report issues unless you're a tech vlogger with a large following inside Google or a >= $100,000,000 customer. Most other companies are much the same. They're not just blind to bugs. They're deliberately putting bags over their heads to keep from seeing what users are telling them.
I think at least half of the software developers out there simply don't test their code in the final product (or at all). And why would they when their revision is being reviewed in a pull request?
Reading the first part of the article I thought it was about real bugs and I was like "Wow we are surrounded by hundreds to thousands of bugs a week, but are blind to them somehow".
No. Designers shouldn't force their own preferences on third parties. Everybody likes different text presentation, so websites should stick to the defaults and let readers configure their browsers as they prefer.
An interesting version of this is when a team basically internalizes some issues in the software they work on and it turns into something they accept as a fact of life or even turn into a joke. „X failed again? Don’t bother, it’s been a shitshow for years.” What?!
A few years ago I started leading a team working on a product that had a lot of „legacy” quirks like that. It took me a good while to set a strong quality bar, both mentally and technically. I would frequently point out where the mindset was wrong, prioritize certain fixes over project work, fix a lot of issues myself, fight with other teams to fix their stuff, run silly contests such as „who solves the most support tickets this month gets a prize” and sometimes even „stop the world” for a few days until we got something in order.
Some people might be prone to think their team will never have the time to do that (and some may be right) but in my experience quality pays back. Often fixing a small bug takes about as long as discussing if it’s important, properly filing it in JIRA and then communicating to the outside world it’s not the priority. And eventually you reach a point where you have way more calm and focus than before because nothing is burning.
Some developers treat their software like a baby when they test it or show it to others. Tapping cleanly and slowly, giving animations time to finish, scrolling slow and smooth, etc.
I like to beat the shit out of my software when testing. Constant erratic scrolling and zooming, multi-touch shenanigans, pressing multiple buttons as fast as I can, using back gestures and the browser back button (if it's a web app), changing the window size and orientation frantically, and just all kinds of rough usage.
If your software can't cope with these things then you're doing a disservice to your users.
I agree quality blindness is curable. Many communities (e.g. Japanese, Swiss, Yemeni, Peruvian etc) have shown attention to detail is just a learning and, most importantly, social status process. Bugs are just the opposite of caring, and caring is at odds with hustle culture. I think Apple is a great example here - used to be meticulous and now every day the amount of tiny defects is just infuriating (just now I realised, for example, that Photos can't scroll with a mouse).
there’s a general dismissive attitude with these bugs. When you report them, customer service responds with incredulity, and continues to explain that’s how the software is supposed to work.
CS has been trained to close conversations, not to resolve issues.
I’ve reported critical issues with my bank where the accounting was broken, money was missing, transfers were inconsistent. Customer service loves to explain “well that’s just how the system works”.
Sorry no, the system has failed. It’s an accounting system, and by definition needs to be accurate, or at least report an error if it can’t remain consistent.
The same standards that would fail an interview are completely ignored for paying customers.
> so the non-LLM options here are some posts that are much sloppier than my normal posts (in a human slop kind of way), or almost no posts.
I'm a little confused, but as far as I understand this is a LLM-written post, isn't it? That would explain the very big length of it. Or maybe I've understood things wrong, in which case my excuses to the writer (which, in that case, could reasonably be called a writer).
> Who else uses the Shift key to end the screensaver, because in case the event goes through to an actual program it's least likely to do have unintended effects?
Hahaha. Yup. That's me :) Not the screensaver in my case. I leave my desktop "suspended to memory" overnight, and when I come back in the morning / afternoon, to wake it up I press the Shift key.
But, more on the subject, I kinda find it disappointing that the post doesn't try harder to analyze why this happens to the developers. The explanation doesn't feel satisfactory to me.
This was my experience working on a product that was virtually universally believed by its programmers to be of good if not excellent quality, while, in reality it was atrocious. Just to give you a taste of the quality: Jenkins landing page didn't work because it would take too long for it to load and various timeouts that happen when it fails to load would kick in and just mess it up so much it wouldn't have been useful anyways. Jenkins tests were generated from some horror-show templates written in YAML (some RHEL tool, forgot what it's called) and because there was no other way to test what the template generated other than to deploy the new test into the actual Jenkins server, the server was full of dysfunctional "orphan" (no longer tied to any template) tests that were never deleted. The only way to navigate to the test results of the job you were interested in where to memorize the way the templated name would expand into the URI components of the Jenkins job URL, have some other test results bookmarked, and then modify the URL of the bookmarked page to get the URL of the job you want.
The CI/CD team, however, decided to combat this situation by developing their own server which collected data from Jenkins and displayed a table with the most recent results for select jobs. Green and red being used to indicate whether the job succeeds or fails, the table was mostly red most of the time, with some jobs being continuously red for many months.
Initially, I was hired into CI/CD team, but when I remarked on the desperate state of events in CI/CD department... they wanted me fired, but the company was going through acquisition and they wanted a higher headcount, so, they kept me, but transferred into the least relevant department where I would be as useless as possible: the quality control!
My life as SDET (because QA is a curse word nowadays) exposed me plenty to the situation described by the author. The aspects that the author didn't touch on is that programmers working on such a product that I've experienced a lot are:
* Unwillingness to accept that a large proportions of the product is bad. People have this intuition that some parts might be bad. After all, that's why QA exists: they find a few things, things get fixed, and everyone moves on. And this is how it works in passable quality products. But the situation when everything is on fire and is going to hell in due course sounds alarmist to the people who are on fire and are going to hell in due course. After a certain amount of complaints, all further complaints are dismissed.
* Unwillingness to accept the existence of strategic mistakes. The QA simply is not allowed to voice their opinion on product or feature design. The only way a tester can initiate a fix is if they can create a test that illustrates the problem. Saying, for example, that "our error reporting is bad because it's useless to the customer and it cannot be meaningfully reported back to the developers" was dismissed as "nothing to do here" (but, actually, meaning: it's above your paygrade).
I don't believe either of these would've been fixed by "simply pointing out the bug", as the author claims. Our industry came to a particular way of doing things that are pathologically bad. The way QA works is OK-ish, when the product itself is of an OK-ish quality. When the product is really bad, the QA is powerless to initiate a fix. QA isn't trusted enough, and, usually, is perceived as a liability, and furthermore, stuffed with engineers nobody else wants. Unless this is changed, the pathologically bad products (like the Blackboard) will have no hope of ever improving (eventually, they will just die either under their own weight, or replaced by something else).
I think there are two opposite causes here: either an overly-aligned or completely unaligned mental model.
For developers, bug-blindness tends to be because their mental model is so close to the system's model that both have the same blind spots, and the developer can't effectively think outside the system (the classic "QA walks into a bar, orders 0 beers, orders -1 beers, orders 0.999 beers" vs "customer walks into a bar, asks where the bathroom is, bar immediately bursts into flames").
On the other hand, a common way for regular people to interact with a system is they just... don't have a model. None at all. Like, they click a thing and see what it does, and if it doesn't do what they expect they shrug and click something else. The horror of seeing a non-software person using a software system is realising that they usually cannot tell the difference between expected and unexpected behaviour, because they don't really form expectations in the first place. The computer is more genie than machine.
You can see this in the article: "Google Docs added some kind of delay such that the typing you do into the title box right after you open the doc gets overwritten". That's a developer forming a model of the system. The lay alternative is to simply learn that sometimes when you type in a box, the text appears. Other times, it doesn't. If it doesn't, you try again.
You don't need to understand the system if you abandon the assumption that the system was designed to be understood. And, in practice, the widespread plagues of shitty engineering, anti-features, and lack of respect for the user often combine to make that model the more information-theoretically optimal one.
In that sense, the very thing that makes us miserable is our perverse need to treat Google Docs as an engineered product rather than a cross between a djinn and a symbiotic fungus.
> a common way for regular people to interact with a system is they just... don't have a model. None at all. Like, they click a thing and see what it does, and if it doesn't do what they expect they shrug and click something else. The horror of seeing a non-software person using a software system is realising that they usually cannot tell the difference between expected and unexpected behaviour, because they don't really form expectations in the first place. The computer is more genie than machine.
This is completely lost on most developers, which is why interface and UX designers exist. Developers, especially in FOSS projects, often love to condescendingly assert that users are just not reading the docs, or are not smart enough to understand the software. They’re smart enough— they just don’t want to have to learn about technical implementation details for the same reason most developers are perfectly content to use personal bookkeeping apps instead of learning the best ways to organize that data and making the spreadsheets manually. Most non-technologists get no dopamine hit from solving technical problems, have no need for the requisite knowledge needed to confidently do that, and are often just trying to make the computer do what it must so they can get back to doing what they’re actually passionate and knowledgeable about. When a competing product has an interface built for people without that mental model, it would have to be pretty fucking expensive to not be a no-brainier for most nontechnical users.
> They’re smart enough
I worked at a small company that had a policy of putting devs on front-line support in a rotation, both because it was too small to have dedicated support staff and because the owners wanted devs to understand how users interacted with the system better.
I can assure you that while some users merely think differently than devs, there is cohort of users who are absolutely not smart enough. It's impossible to do any amount of front-line support without collecting some horror stories.
One of my favorites is spending nearly 10 minutes trying to get someone to read a single word on their screen correctly, in a dialog box that was blocking them, containing fewer than 10 words, so I could find the cause of their problem. After nearly 30 minutes to figure out that they had a popup blocking them, and not "the computer doesn't work".
What eventually worked was getting them to spell it to me backwards. That strategy has worked out quite well in other cases too - I suspect because it avoids some of people's built-in autocorrect and dyslexia (autoincorrect).
(I honestly mostly enjoy tech support, and I've done it for many years, sometimes professionally. But some people do seem like lost causes, and are not just having a bad day)
I have experienced this in person with a developer who was failing to debug something. An error message was popping up on screen and he was reflexively clicking it away faster than anybody could read it. Even after being told “an error message is popping up, don’t dismiss it”, even after being told “[do the thing that triggers the bug] and then completely stop without doing anything else”, and a whole bunch of other ways of phrasing it, he was unable to understand that the error message contained useful information that we needed to see. I’m not even sure he was consciously aware it existed or that he was doing it. After many failed attempts at getting him to stop I literally had to take the mouse away from him and do it myself. I was shocked that apparently nothing anybody could say would stop him from dismissing the error message without even looking at it.
I think this comes from the same problem as notifications on iPhones: if you dismiss them accidentally then it is very difficult to find out what it was.
It is missing the equivalent of the "history" in e.g. browsers and YouTube.
If a user dismisses an alertbox on desktop, why isn't there an history menu item that shows the previous 100 alert messages?
As an aside I really like video games that have a running log of everything characters have said. Persona 5 does this. It's a rare feature from my experience!
That may be an issue for messages from people but almost anything that pops up because the computer wants to tell you is useless and certainly doesn't need to be findable later. If you want to work on the problem, you can do that when you're ready, at your own initiative, not in the middle of what you're actually trying to do. Programmers wouldn't stand for a language that pops up a modal dialog when you type incorrect code but we think users are somehow less deserving of respect and ready to drop everything to deal with some stupid notification telling them they did it wrong or the software is broken like a crying child demanding his mother knows that he hurt his finger.
Reflexively dismissing error message popups is reasonable behavior because they're almost always unhelpful. It is often easier to mindlessly trial-and-error your way around obstacles than waste your attention on them.
> If you want to work on the problem, you can do that when you're ready, at your own initiative, not in the middle of what you're actually trying to do.
As I explained earlier, what we were actually trying to do was debug the problem, and reading the error message was a necessary part of that.
It’s weird you’ve cooked up this little fantasy that the error message was getting in the way when it was the most important thing in the whole process and that was the entire point of the anecdote.
> Reflexively dismissing error message popups is reasonable behavior because they're almost always unhelpful.
Not when you’re trying to debug the problem the error message is telling you about!
I don't agree with much of the above but I do agree that we should endeavor to minimize error notifications and the like because people don't read them. We (as programmers) should endeavor to make things "self-heal" or work in such a way that most people don't have these kinds of notifications interrupt them. E.g. if "error X" happens a lot find a way to make the action that causes "error X" work without an error. Easier said than done though.
> Programmers wouldn't stand for a language that pops up a modal dialog when you type incorrect code
I have no idea why you think this. The only reason I wouldn't like it is because I might be doing something that requires incorrect code as a placeholder, but if the modal didn't come back after being dismissed (and just sat in a history) I'd be pleased as punch. It's why I moved to rust - I wanted the compiler to stop me.
Not only do you think this, but you think it's somehow a sign of being egotistical and disrespectful that anyone would like to know when they're screwing up. Weird.
> they're almost always unhelpful.
Sounds like you found the real problem.
iOS has no (user-viewable) notification history?
Very limited: as soon as you have cleared a notification it is gone forever and old notifications are also gone rather quickly.
https://www.lifewire.com/iphone-notification-history-1189516...
It's so weird to me that this kind of thing wasn't a day-1 kind of thing. Android's has loads of issues too[1], not least of which is that you need to manually enable it.
1: you can't get access to actions or details in the history (e.g. no long-press to change settings), nor does it show you ones you didn't dismiss by hand afaict (I've been having Discord notifications disappearing almost immediately after making a noise, but there's nothing in history even though I saw it for its whole half-second existence because it popped over my screen).
Almost everyone has this popup dismissal reflex. People don't read them and click or tap them away instinctively. I think software creators should know this by now and stop using popups in their software.
Sometimes the reflex is so strong, it is extremely hard to stop it, even when you're aware of it. Something like that has happened to me once. There was some kind of password form, where it said DO NOT PRESS ENTER after typing the password. I pressed enter. It took me several attempts to get through it.
I'm guilty of dismissing useful messages sometimes, so I'm running a program, RetroClip for macOS, that records the last 30/60 seconds of screen capture into a ring buffer in RAM (with compression, but the CPU/GPU/power usage seems to be almost negligible). It writes out a file when you press a hotkey. Very helpful in these "wait, wtf did just happen" situations.
That's even worse than the "I'm getting an error when I ..." type! ("...ok... What's the error?")
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The person I replied to described their frustration with a colleague dismissing an error message without reading, not a user. I'm not shaming users not providing clear actionable feedback with stack traces and reproduction steps. I've known fellow software engineers throw their hands up and ask for help because they're 'getting an error', that's what's annoying (because they should know better, ok what have you done before asking me, etc.) not users.
The flip side of this is the pleasant surprise of working with a near-retirement age grandma who assures you that she "isn't technical" and "doesn't know how to use a computer", but will studiously write down every keyboard shortcut on little post-it notes and add it to their collection like they're porcelain cats she found at the Sunday markets. I've watched some of these people operate a computer in a manner reminiscent of watching an F1 driver at work, the screen just a blur as their fingers dance over the keyboard.
Absolutely, the ones that are clearly trying more than make up for the rest imo, and some are stunning. There are a lot of them. And many of the rest are just having a bad brain day and need help rubber-ducking to see the thing right in front of them - we've all been there, many times.
This sounds like "Smart person who has little technical experience and might have cognitive decline from age". The world is fully of people who's intelligence is legitimately lower than you might expect.
Cognitive decline from age is something the SWE community also neglects to think about.
You may feel superior to the average IQ person right now, but we're all going to regress to that point & worse at some point.
Design software & plan your life accordingly.
> The world is fully of people who's intelligence
What an example of a sentence a person *whose intelligence is lower than you might expect would write. I can only imagine this was intentional.
Could you clarify? Are you using the typo as this basis, or something else?
There were 2 typos in that sentence (the one I didn’t mention is “fully” instead of “full”). Talking about intelligence in such a sloppy manner sounded like a joke to me.
Ah sry - phone typing
This makes me think of "we're all just temporarily abled". This proves the point -- sometimes we're just typing on our phone, lol
I'm not the same person, but probably. There are at least two errors in the quoted fragment, though personally I don't think either is especially indicative of a lack of intelligence.
Reminds me of how people learning to draw/paint are told to flip the subject upside-down, to bypass their interpretation getting in the way of seeing.
I was always soooo tempted to say "pretend I can't see whatever you're looking at right now..."
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There's a selection effect here in that smart-enough users won't bother contacting support if they work around an issue on their own, or if something is actually a non-issue for 99%+ of the user base. The ratio of usage and support contacts can be monitored. I fear a lot of devs develop unproductive mental models of the user purely from a minority sample.
Smart users forced to use work arounds may also find the workaround is to switch to your competitors product !
Designing for the stupid users also makes life easier for the smart users. No matter what you are designing. It makes your product better.
That's trivially false. There's a large difference between products designed primarily to have a low learning curve, and products designed to maximize the efficiency of users that have been trained in its use.
The only products which should have any mandatory learning curve are products which actually allow an expert to do something out of the ordinarily, which simply could not be done with an easy to use product. Such as some musical instruments.
Otherwise, you can most of the time make a product which can be easy to use for novices while retaining maximum efficiency for experts.
Compare a professional trader's UI to something consumer-grade like Robinhood, or analytics UIs designed for marketers (exposing only a few cute graphs with a handful of predefined parameters) to the dashboards used in physics labs, or simple graphics programs vs. Blenders.
Maximum efficiency for experts requires removing information that would be distracting and redundant for them, but essential for novices to understand the working model of the program, so you're pretty much wrong.
Sometimes, not always.
It may result in power users losing some features.
Not necessarily. Interface design is a communication medium. A skilled designer can often communicate to multiple types of users solving different types of problems. When an interface is “dumbed down,” it’s usually because a non-designer was trying to ‘clean it up’ or make it pretty by removing what they didn’t need and ignoring what everybody else needs. It’s difficult, and that’s why it’s a distinct field with its own degrees and professional programs.
Sure, but whenever you can make life easier for those who have are having hard time without making life harder for those who aren't, you should do it.
For example, no power user benefits from having to use work arounds to make a product function. It's an annoyance to them, and it's an insurmountable obstacle to others.
Wild to me and speaks volumes of HN/SWEs that this is getting downvoted.
> I worked at a small company that had a policy of putting devs on front-line support in a rotation, both because it was too small to have dedicated support staff and because the owners wanted devs to understand how users interacted with the system better.
In the 2010s Mathworks, the company that makes Matlab, had a policy that everyone started in frontline support. Including developers. (They probably still have this policy, I don't know.)
It shaped attitudes and cultures quite a bit.
The shaping isn't necessarily productive, though. My company has a policy wherein a the dev team are on a rota to assist the support team (and by extension clients) with technical queries. The net effect has been to make me hate customers with a passion usually reserved for opposing political regimes and childhood bullies.
>The net effect has been to make me hate customers
So what every support person lives thru on every day of work.
And really being a good support person involves figuring out what bucket the customer belongs in.
"Customers that are smarter than you and if they are talking to you, your shit is wrong somehow"
"Customers that are smart in general, but need some guidance accomplish more complex tasks"
"Customers that aren't very smart, but handholding works to solve their problems"
"Customers that are dumb, realize they are dumb, and persistent at being dumb"
and finally the worst
"Customers that think they are smart and are belligerent if their intelligence is questioned as they are doing something horrifically stupid"
Oh, I don't think MathWorks has a regular rota. As far as I remember, You do your duties when you join, and then you are free.
I wish it was just users. I once had to explain to a PM on client's side for 10 minutes that no, the software can't split $1.00 into three exactly equal invoices and we need to put that remaining $0.01 somewhere. In the end it seemed like he's given up without understanding the nature of the problem and escalated to have someone higher up to tell us to add it to the last invoice.
Well, software doesn’t exist for its own sake, the sake of the people that made it, or the sake of some kind of exclusive smartypants club. The purpose is to solve problems or accomplish tasks for people— some of whom are not cognitively gifted. A good interface will take everybody that needs it into account, including people that need less handholding if the usage is different enough.
> there is cohort of users who are absolutely not smart enough
The average IQ is 100, half of people are below that. Being surprised that customers may be of different intelligence is the kind of thing that comes out of people who have never had to work a retail/restaurant job in high school growing up. If someone has made it that far in life before finding this out, they've lived in a bubble.
People of varying intelligence levels can operate a motor vehicle and yet software can't be designed well enough for them? The failure may be on the SWEs.
There exists a floor to how "idiot-proof" Motor vehicles are since they do require a skill test and a licensing protocol to legally operate that do weed out some number of humans not competent enough to operate them (and even beyond that insurance qualifications can weed out some more: crash or commit infractions too much and you lose and/or get priced out of your ability to legally drive). And rightly so due to the unique hazards that they pose: but for want of those things one may easily still have to try to support their software for users incapable of gainfully handling a motor vehicle.
Automobiles and the international road network have also had well over a century to standardize themselves over a glacially slowly changing set of expectations while we're writing drivers for 400GBE chipsets that only got invented last Tuesday and building agent management harnesses for styles of neural networks that literally weren't even a twinkle in the milk-man's eye yet as recently as fidget spinners being in style.
Sure software moves fast, but it also moves slow.
How many bad UX redesigns do major desktop/phone OSes need for their phone/text/mail/photos apps?
We're at least 30 years into email apps for example, and yet the UX changes year to year for.. reasons.
The thing is that good interface design is basically invisible, so most people, developers notwithstanding, take it for granted. In the late 90s, there were entire books published on using popular email clients like Eudora, but a literal child can figure out how to use, say, fastmail entirely through feature self-discovery, and fastmail has more features!
I also think the ego stroking borne from disproportionately high labor demand has given many developers a serious case of main character syndrome.
I think I can see where you're coming from - and it is true that there are cases of dogmatism as a defense for just sucking at UX - but I violently disagree here.
Good UX I believe doesn't mean that the implementation details are hidden, but conveyed in a way that is human-readable. You do not hide the machine from the man, but translate between them in a way that makes neither of them invisible.
This makes for better experiences, as reality gets bound by.. well.. reality. So you don't get these weird failure modes that live in the gap between the narrative (e.g. "everything just works") and reality (e.g. "networks are always black magic").
This is also important for the user, because by having _a_ mental model (even if it is very low-res), they gain the ability to diagnose issues themselves and not be completely helpless once the magic box breaks down. They might not know exactly what to do, but the direction is very clear.
Agency is important. A lot more important than convenience. And fake convenience through frontloading short-term rewards for long-term systemic instability.
A developer sees an application as a toolkit to help them solve a problem. The more flexibility and power, the better it is. They’ve become comfortable with complex tools on the computer, over the years, because they enjoy learning about and using computers.
A nontechnical end user generally isn’t interested in operating a toolkit— they want to solve their problem, and the application claims to do that. The easier it is for them to get from problem to solution, the better.
When a developer sees a software interface, they see a palette of commands and parameters to pass to a software back end. Understanding that, and it’s implications, took years of learning and intensive usage that has blended into an imperceptible base layer of technological understanding.
To a nontechnical end user, the interface is the software. The button might as well mechanically do something. For whatever reason, often because they didn’t find it interesting, or their cognitive skillset didn’t easily adapt to it, or they just didn’t have the exposure, they didn’t learn about the basic structure of applications, and they’d be years away from understanding it enough to make decisions based on that.
Flexibility and power yields agency for technical users. It blurs obvious pathways and dampens signals for nontechnical users that just want a problem solved.
It’s difficult for experts to see things with novice eyes. That’s one of the most important things a designer can do for the software building process.
Fundamentally, interface design is a communication discipline. There’s a reason it’s a field unto itself, with its own degrees and professional organizations, and there’s a reason it’s often taught in art schools. There’s also a reason that every significant user-facing interface in your life, from your text messaging apps to the ordering kiosks in restaurants— none of which need documentation— were created by designers and not developers. Looking nice is not the point — it’s often a side effect of clear and deliberate communication, which is both difficult and important.
Respectfully, I ain't reading all that with this opener. UX failed
Because it’s not even twice as long as what you wrote? If you’re dead set on not knowing something, I can’t stop you. PEBKAC.
> Good UX I believe doesn't mean that the implementation details are hidden, but conveyed in a way that is human-readable. You do not hide the machine from the man, but translate between them in a way that makes neither of them invisible.
This is where skeuomorphism used to be king before computers ate the world. In the 90s everybody knew how a paper book worked, so document readers presented as books. Everyone knew how a tape deck worked, so audio apps presented as tape decks. Floppy disk as save icon, etc
Unfortunately, the passage of time is inexorable, and by the late 2000s we had a lot of users who had never actually seen a tape deck/floppy disk. And the whole skeuomorphic project came crashing down.
Skeuomorphism didn't fail. It feel out of fashion with designers.
We should distinguish between skeuomorphic interaction design and skeuomorphic iconography. Attempts at skeuomorphic interaction design did fail badly, I'll give you that. Document readers that expect you to turn the page by pulling at the edge of the page, mimicking a page turn in a physical book, they're terrible.
But skeuomorphic iconography works: The more detail you add to an icon, the easier it is to form mental associations with what it does - and that goes even if you don't know the original object that it's based on. Sure, a lot of people have never seen the floppy disk that the traditional Save icon is based on, making the icon less intuitive now than when it was designed. But what would you replace it with? Any alternative you might suggest is just going to be less recognisable.
> Sure, a lot of people have never seen the floppy disk that the traditional Save icon is based on, making the icon less intuitive now than when it was designed. But what would you replace it with? Any alternative you might suggest is just going to be less recognisable.
Obviously you replace it with the three stacked cylinders that symbolize a hard drive. ;D
Are you sure they don't represent drum memory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drum_memory
I don't see much reason to think so, given that that's still what hard drives look like. I don't have any evidence for or against.
A solid state hard drive...?
It’s funny. The only people that regularly, seriously discuss skeuomorphism in software design are software developers. It was a big conversational topic among designers around the time Apple ditched the faux leather padding at the top of the calendar app. Developers started talking about it, I believe, because it’s an unusually concrete topic among typically abstract, nebulous, or artsy design conversations. Since then, there have been a zillion other big topics in the design world, and it’s largely considered a conceptual facet of design that’s just not very important. But developers, decades later, still discuss skeuomorphism in design like it’s one of the great important topics of the field. It’s not.
It would be like if smashing magazine put out an article in 2015 about everybody moving to a “microservices architecture” and then any time any kind of software development came up in a design forum, someone would awkwardly shoehorn the discussion into a framework of microservices vs monolithic applications. (Even better, when a developer would come along and try to give a more nuanced perspective, the designers would see themselves as the authority in the conversation because all the other designers around agreed with them.)
If you really want to dig into the nerdy conceptual side of icon design, triadic semiotics is the far more interesting rabbit hole to fall down.
This is exactly how our letters came about - 'A' originally was written sideways and represented an ox head, but now everybody just knows it as a letter.
I've seen an SD card icon used for a save icon before. I think conveniently the shape is similar enough to a floppy that you find it while scanning for it as well
Did it though? Most people young today probably never pressed a physical play/pause/stop button in their lives. Still, they get it. Some icons outlive their era, some don’t.
> In the 90s everybody knew how a paper book worked
I hope that’s still the case!
> Did it though? Most people young today probably never pressed a physical play/pause/stop button in their lives.
It's hard to call this an example of "skeuomorphism". Those icons were introduced on physical buttons with a certain meaning that everybody had to learn. They have exactly the same meaning on software buttons; the interaction that people have with them now is the same interaction that everybody has always had with them.
This isn't a case of the software appealing to a visual metaphor that made non-metaphorical sense before the software. It was just as much of a metaphor originally as it is now. You might as well call the word "edit" a skeuomorphism in modern software because past software also had "edit" menus.
> the interaction that people have with them now is the same interaction that everybody has always had with them
Right, that was my point. What does it matter what a diskette used to be? Unless something more obvious to convey storage/saving comes along, it’s hardly “crashing down” anytime soon.
The disk icon is skeuomorphic because it's a picture of storage media. That has now gone obsolete and, instead of being skeuomorphic, it's vestigial.
Play and pause icons aren't skeuomorphic. They're symbolic. There is no point at which they were a reference to some phenomenon earlier than or other than themselves.
Play, rewind and FF icons were referring to the physical movement of tape past the play head, back when you could see the tape. Don't know what pause came from. Maybe there was a pair of felt pads that would press the tape on either side of the head to keep it tensioned while preventing movement?
> Don't know what pause came from
The double-pipe pause symbol originates on the video side, where pausing keeps displaying a freeze-frame image, and stopping does not. Audio players had pause long before (which just causes the drive wheel to un-grip the tape), but used a variety of different symbols.
I guess even with the physical buttons you had to just learn that triangle means play and twin towers means pause
I guess even without the physical buttons you had to just learn that "play" means "engage the appropriate technical machinery".
> "[play] The meaning "to cause (a recording) to reproduce what is on it" is by 1903, probably from the "make music" sense." - https://www.etymonline.com/word/play
How did people learn the UX of a book, or a tape deck? When I was a child, sometimes I was fascinated by the fact the tape deck buttons couldn't be pressed in certain combinations, like the record button that forcibly presses play, and the fact rewind and fastforward would latch until you pressed another button. But I didn't know what half of them did.
That's one of the things that surprised me (in a positive way) about Mac OS X when I first got to use it -- it actually does indeed do lots of things in an _understandable_ and genuinely simple way. It's also clear how much work went into making the system behave in this way, it certainly wasn't an accident.
In the era of web apps and Electronification of anything I believe most of this is sadly gone, but in the older Mac OS X models you could clearly understand and see the logic behind the software and I believe it worked well for non-technical people from what I observed.
> often love to condescendingly assert that users are just not reading the docs, or are not smart enough to understand the software.
The older I get, the more annoying I find this habit in the SWE community. It's not even a well earned condescension. Software is often horrible! Physical hardware products are not put out into the world with the kind of defects that software so regularly is.
We get away with it because we say we can patch it later, though often all we do is move defects around.
It's amazing picking up pre-internet connected era electronics from 30/40/50 years ago and they just.. work.
Meanwhile software decays at a faster and faster rate each year. I am coming around to the idea of keeping air gapped old-OS machines around just to maintain pieces of software that otherwise auto-update themselves into oblivion.
Nobody reads the docs. This will be even more true soon as LLM generated docs become more popular. I once read a user report "would be nice if I could move large Xs to uncover Y", filed a bug report myself to add the feature, and then realized that feature was already added and documented months ago, by me! I just updated it with an unobtrusive prompt/instruction to the UI when relevant. I definitely get lazy sometimes, but if you don't take the extra step to make sure a feature is easily discoverable and understandable in the UI, you're wasting almost all of its potential benefit.
I love the UX-design book: Don't Make Me Think.
There's an idea in this book, that when using a mouse, smaller buttons are harder to click because you need to stop the cursor inside its hitbox, but moving the cursor to the edge of the screen is easy because it's effectively a huge button whose height is infinite (or infinite width for lateral edges). And hitting a corner is even easier because it effectively has both infinite width and height!
This means that if there is an actual, finite button on a corner, the easiest way to click it is to position the cursor on the very corner, rather than attempting to position the cursor in the middle. But this is ruined if this button has padding. So for example, the start button on windows at the bottom left corner had padding in earlier versions of windows like windows 98, but the actual hitbox of the button shouldn't have padding, so that it's easier to click.
This is all to say that I use Firefox maximized, without a titlebar or menubar, so that the "back" button is at the top left corner of the screen, and the hamburguer button is at the top right corner. But those buttons have padding! If I actually move the mouse to the very corner before clicking, I miss the button
That shit is infuriating
> There's an idea in this book, that when using a mouse, smaller buttons are harder to click
That would be Fitt’s law, which - if you can believe it - dates back to 1954!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law
Padding is typically part of the hitbox, margin is not. What you are describing sounds like margin to me. Especially for Firefox since their UI is made with web tech.
But besides being overly pedantic I agree with your general point. If their is a small gap between hitbox and edge of the screen it is very annoying.
But the worst thing IMO is Windows 11 windows which you can grab by the titlebar but not the content area. However often there is no visual indication of where the titlebar starts/stops.
Also, more than 90% of the title bar are active UI elements like menus and close buttons, and you have to guess which few pixels are actually inert enough to allow dragging.
Note I am not talking about the title bar (it's hidden here), I am talking about the bar where the address bar is (also back/forward/reload buttons and extension buttons)
Fixing this would require whole-system thinking. The corners of a window are nothing special. The corners of a screen are special, and exploiting that requires thinking about the screen, even though as an application developer, your responsibility stops at the window.
>so that the "back" button is at the top left corner of the screen
"Back" is used so frequently that I consider any mouse lacking a side button for "back" to be incomplete. You don't need to put a high value on your time for upgrading your mouse to pay for itself within its service life.
On the other end of that spectrum I cannot _stand_ back button on the mouse and always disable the feature immediately because it is often too easy for me to click those fiddly side buttons without meaning to (either while grabbing or while re-adjusting my hand position on the mouse)
So I usually only map middle click to such a button, as that button is at least 90% of the time relatively safe to accidentally trigger.
Middle mouse button is often mapped to "paste selection", which is dangerous to accidentally trigger. If the side buttons on a mouse are easy to trigger by accident it means they're positioned wrong. My mouse is shaped so that my thumb naturally rests slightly below the side buttons, and I have to raise it slightly to press them.
Steve Krug's other book, Rocket Surgery Made Easy, got me into usability tests with real users, and how to get it in place in a corporate environment. It's shocking to watch real users use software.
It's still a wild logical leap to me that we went from this observation, that maybe the bottom half of users never learn how the software works, to the idea that we should build software that is actively learning-hostile. In the old era, we established consistent UI patterns: this kind of button does X, this kind of button behaves like Y, here are the tools to solve your problem. Maybe not everyone learned the patterns, but those that did became wildly productive. Now: who cares if buttons are recognizable as such, your bottom half of users tap all over the place anyway, so design for them exclusively. It's good to enable more people, but we also lost something in the process.
I cynically ascribe that to a change in the market/ecosystem, from "personal computer as democratized means of production" to the (more profitable) "device we control to sell content and subscriptions to you".
The root problem is so-called startup/growth hacker culture: you start from zero user. There are a lot of potential users out there. Far more than your current users. So, the best way to grow your business is not to retain your current users, but to grab new users.
In this scenario, you only need to cater to the most clueless users. There is no need to make an app learnable as you don't even intent to keep the users long enough for them to actually learn how your app works.
> "Google Docs added some kind of delay such that the typing you do into the title box right after you open the doc gets overwritten".
Well, Jira does that too in many of its input widgets: anything you type while the page is loading is cleared after the page is loaded.
At this point users have been conditioned to accept this sort of react crap.
> "Google Docs added some kind of delay such that the typing you do into the title box right after you open the doc gets overwritten"
GitHub also introduced this feature recently in the New Issue GUI.
In my UX jobs where we did actual UX research with participants in the office the UX research team would go around before each session and find any available developers to come with and sit behind the one way mirror to watch.
You could always tell when it was someone’s first time watching a real user attempt to use our website.
> You don't need to understand the system if you abandon the assumption that the system was designed to be understood.
This applies to software engineers too. Especially now there's claude to help them complete the tickets without understanding the system.
> On the other hand, a common way for regular people to interact with a system is they just... don't have a model. None at all. Like, they click a thing and see what it does, and if it doesn't do what they expect they shrug and click something else.
I suspect that's part of why fuzzing is so powerful.
> You can see this in the article: "Google Docs added some kind of delay such that the typing you do into the title box right after you open the doc gets overwritten". That's a developer forming a model of the system. The lay alternative is to simply learn that sometimes when you type in a box, the text appears. Other times, it doesn't. If it doesn't, you try again.
Things like this just infuriate me. The user just learns that things are unreliable. To me that's unacceptable for something to be presenting a text box to type text, let you type it, then wipe it out. Sometimes you have to wait a second after typing something before clicking search, or it searches for your incomplete query a half second before. I don't blame users for just concluding that typing is unreliable.
the people without a model are also the easiest users to lose, they won't file a bug or explain what broke. they'll just click twice, decide the product is unreliable and use something else. then the team sees no bug report and assumes everything is fine.
Why should I file a bug? So it can be ignored until a PM eventually declares bankruptcy and wipes the tracker clean?
There are some well reported bugs in Microsoft/Google/Apple that have persisted for years. Nobody cares.
I had to give up when the first example of a "bug" that the author could see, which others are blind to, was search results.
"In some cases, people sent me their actual search results. In every such case, the search results did not contain a good result that I could see"
Software that does not meet expectations, especially in a field like search, which is basically a long running war between SEO and search engines, is not a 'bug'. That's like saying there is 'bug blindness' in the publishing industry because when I pick up a random book, it sucks, even though others think it's fine. Sure, maybe something is wrong, could even be improved, but lets save the word 'bug' for something more specific.
> the first example of a "bug" that the author could see, which others are blind to, was search results
The author explicitly says he is using less specific and compelling examples for good reasons:
> I don't want to give any specific examples where it was my job to see how well the thing worked because, even if the internal examples are meant in a constructive, blameless, way, they may not always read that way when re-posted externally, so I'll give a few less interesting and less well supported "random" examples.
https://danluu.com/bug-blind/
I also think it's reasonable to use the term "bug" in a broad or colloquial sense. If a web server is overloaded, that isn't a bug in the strictest sense, but it sure feels like a bug to the person trying to use the website. A search engine is software, and if it fails to surface the most relevant document from its index then I'd say that counts as a bug. Also the author acknowledges this SEO spam issue, e.g. in this quote for the linked post:
> Here's a fun experiment to try. Take an open source project such as yt-dlp and try to find it from a very generic term like "youtube downloader". You won't be able to find it because of all of the content farms that try to rank at the top for that term
https://danluu.com/seo-spam/
At what point does search quality degrade to the point where is becomes a bug?
A bug is when actual behavior does not match stated or intended behavior. If the search bears little connection to what was searched for, then it is a bug, as far as the user is concerned.
Or maybe you mean to say we should reserve the word bug for deviations that are unintentional?
For me the idea that poor quality search results are a bug muddies the idea of what a bug is. It's like saying the colour of the paint in my living room is buggy because I don't like it. It might be an ugly colour that I don't like, but it is what it is. A bug would be if the colour doesn't match what was shown on the tin.
> If the search bears little connection to what was searched for, then it is a bug, as far as the user is concerned.
A bad product perhaps, but not a bug.
That's because as computer people we're very invested in the idea of bugs, while your users are not.
In products your users are stuck with it doesn't matter much, they'll have to suffer with what they think are bugs.
In products that users can switch easily, you can get dropped for a product that you would consider crappier if the user believes it's less 'buggy'.
So if I search for A, and I get results for B instead (where B has only the slightest connection to A), it is not a bug?
What about if B has no connection to A whatsoever? Still not a bug? If it is not, then we may have discovered a software domain (the first for me I should say) where bugs are not possible. Should a be a nice market to launch products for, then.
> So if I search for A, and I get results for B instead (where B has only the slightest connection to A), it is not a bug?
It depends. There could be a bug in the system like query = query.replace(A,B), or it could be that there are no good results for A. Returning nonsense results is a bad design, but not necessarily a bug.
I guess my underlying point is that bugs are about software not conforming to some specified behaviour, and trying to specify behaviour like "i should type in a search and get great results" is too loose of a spec to be meaningful so we should avoid saying things which don't meet that criteria are bugs. To use a concrete example, perhaps the set of search results returned for a query look useless to you but are actually useful for someone else.
Compare that with something like a calculator app where part of the spec is "Must handle integer addition with for inputs i,j where -10,000 <= i <= 10,000 and -10,000 <= j <= 10,000". Then if in your calculator you do 1+1 and get 3, then that is clearly a bug per the spec.
Bugs vs. bad design is a useful distinction to make imo.
The trouble is, there are three different "versions" of "the search didn't work," only one of which I would say is definitely a bug:
- The thing the user searched for doesn't exist, so it wasn't found. This is not a bug.
- The user did a good job of searching, using relevant keywords etc, but the relevant thing (which exists) didn't come up. This is a bug.
- "Search didn't read my mind" -- if search is a core competency this is a bug, but otherwise I would consider it a deficiency or a missing feature.
> At what point does search quality degrade to the point where is becomes a bug?
It depends entirely on the commitment made by the service, so e.g. my desktop file search program results has bugs whereas Google's has none.
Later in the article he uses "quality blindness" instead, which is probably a better description of most of the issues he talks about.
Dan isn't necessarily Bertrand Russell so ill give him a pass for not using the perfect word in every place.
But this article is in my opinion one of the best attempts at explaining a fundamental problem in software product work that has never (in my experience) been laid out this well. I will implore you to finish it.
> Software that does not meet expectations, especially in a field like search, which is basically a long running war between SEO and search engines, is not a 'bug'.
While bug has various definitions, not meeting reasonable expectations is common to all.
> That's like saying there is 'bug blindness' in the publishing industry because when I pick up a random book, it sucks
No, because there's no reasonable expectation that a random book won"t suck.
I dunno... people keep telling me books are good but that isn't my experience
Just like when a do a search and the results aren't relevant
Obviously this means both books and web searches are useless
Later on he gives an example of Blackboard software that was very disliked. So I don't see what was unique in his perspective either. To me this article is not very focused and feels mostly like rambling. The core idea that we get accustomed to bugs/quality in software we use is sound. Just the article needs streamlining or better a complete rewrite.
Responding to something from the linked Patreon post:
> Blackboard (as well as Epic and SharePoint) are classic examples of software where the user and the purchaser are different and the purchaser basically doesn’t care about the user, so you don’t expect the software to be good and it would be a bit of a surprised if the software didn’t deliver a bad user experience. But it was even more surprising to me that someone working on some of the most reviled software out there could think that the software was widely loved.
I worked briefly at Epic and the attitude there seemed to be more like "yes we know people hate Epic but they're wrong". :P People there didn't think Epic was widely liked!
(The explanations given were basically, 1. people hate Epic because their IT department configured it wrong, if they configured it in a more suitable manner they wouldn't have these problems, and, 2. it's not Epic per se that's the problem it's all EMR software, if you think Epic is bad you should see the competition, they're even worse. I'm not sure that second one is really such a good excuse, but, that was what I remember hearing.)
A close acquaintance was on Medicaid, and then got a new job and was moved off of Medicaid onto an insurance plan they were paying for. Medicaid is administered by insurance companies; the same company administered both their Medicaid plan, and the plan they were now paying for.
As it so happened, within a week of this occurring they needed urgent care, badly, no joke. We have basically three choices here (at least, which would take this insurer), and none of the three would see them, and the reason was the same in all cases: 1) they no longer had Medicaid, and 2) the provider couldn't let them pay cash and sort it out with the insurance company themselves.
It took three days calling the insurer, providers, the State health exchange, finally getting the insurer on the phone DIRECTLY with one of the providers... at a clinic rather than in admin... the insurer directly telling the clinic administrators that the person was insured and the insurance company would give them a claim number right now, or something like that... before we could get them in to see a doctor.
When we got to the clinic they looked them up and STILL told them they couldn't see them we had to demand to speak to an administrator and basically THEY COULDN'T CHECK THEM IN TO THEIR APPOINTMENT in their computer.
All of these providers used Epic. I made some additional phone calls and had some additional conversations, made a writeup, and sent it to the insurer, the benefit exchange, and the provider who ultimately saw us. Never heard anything from anyone.
Interesting topic, and funny that I personally consider the text width and font size of danluu’s blog to be a “bug”. It is well known that we can read faster with narrower text columns (remember newspaper columns when they were printed on paper). This is why I always read this particular blog with Apple’s Reader mode, which renders the text using larger font and narrower width.
Indeed. It is unreadable without a Reader mode.
also reader on ios interprets it wrong as it picks up the first heading as the article’s title, and that makes me think that it could skip some content as it’s prone to do, so back to poorly readable layout I go.
There is no CSS configuration for text/font on the website, so it's using browser defaults.
Seems like reader mode is needed due to bad defaults.
That's a cop out in this specific instance: he knows the defaults are a bug, he can change it with maybe 2x lines of CSS, but he is blind to the fact that it's a bug.
After all, he is complaining about the defaults in other software, but he is blind to the defaults he presents the user.
There is no way to specify a good size in CSS - a size that looks good on current computers will be too big on old computers, and a size that looks good on old computers looks too small on current ones. Browsers and users are the ones who can fix this.
I think your knowledge of CSS might be outdated. What's wrong with the following CSS snippet for example?
As for font size, you can use to respect the browser's default font size.> What's wrong with the following CSS snippet for example?
It doesn't achieve a reasonable readable font size which was presumably the goal. Your padding won't be the right size for all screens either. (And personally I hate excessive line height).
> respect the browser's default font size
The browser's defaults are also bad. But they shouldn't be. The browser is in a position to actually fix this; the webdev isn't.
> The browser's defaults are also bad.
What's bad about them? There is a sensible default and users (in particular those with poor eyesight) will adjust them to their needs.
Ignoring this default is presumptuous.
> What's bad about them? There is a sensible default and users (in particular those with poor eyesight) will adjust them to their needs.
16pt is a sensible default on some screens and very much not on others.
> users (in particular those with poor eyesight) will adjust them to their needs
In the real world they won't though, much as we might both wish otherwise.
>What's wrong with the following CSS snippet
The problem is you're imposing your own idiosyncratic preferences on strangers. Your "improvements" cost valuable screen space. I paid good money for my screen space and I don't appreciate designers unilaterally wasting it because they personally think it looks better. The decision of how much (if any) space to spend on padding should be made by the user.
The designers' job is good usability. Limiting line length is important, humans cannot deal well with extremely long lines of text. This is not a matter of taste.
There is no objective definition of "extremely long". Whatever value you choose will be incorrect for some readers. Therefore the correct place to set it is in the web browser's preferences (or the window manager if you prefer).
Learn how to resize windows, multitasking, tiling, etc. I prefer to have one monitor in portrait but understand many don’t have or not able.
Useful things to know, but how do they undo a designer wasting my screen space? If you're going to tell me to learn something, it should be CSS. At least Firefox can still be configured to follow its traditional role as "user agent" and allow me to override the bad decisions of designers, by setting toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets and editing chrome/userContent.css . But it would be convenient if more people used the default CSS like danluu.com .
Not sure, as I don't have any wasted screen space, due to the techniques mentioned above. On really bad sites I try reader view first, View/Page Style/No Style (on Firefox) second, and if that doesn't work I close the tab. Pretty rare though.
I think this is intentional?
I use Firefox reader, but the same idea. I actually prefer it this way (except I don't like that the reader doesn't support Vi/Emacs navigation...)
For content that is just text, I prefer that the author keeps the styling to the minimum. It makes it easier to do it the way I want it client-side.
> It is well known that we can read faster with narrower text
Speak for yourself.
Font size is client setting, and there's where lies any bug.
I once asked my brother in law (a mechanic) to help me look over and buy a new secondhand car. The car we ended up buying had good fundamentals, low cost, good brand, big trunk, high top speed.
After owning it for a while, I came to learn that it was not a great car. Things constantly broke and the repairs cost me more overall than the cost of the car. A complete disaster.
I came to realise that to a mechanic, little problems like an old fuel pump or poorly maintained engine were "easy" problems to fix. To my brother in law, what mattered was the low price and the fundamentals. Repairs, to him, were easy. To me (not a mechanic) they were expensive and inconvenient.
I think, for a developer, problems with software are a bit like this. Little things that are easy to fix can be overlooked because the grand design of the system is very clever or it has some advantage over other software like handling a particular file format, or processing a high volume of transactions.
Personally, I find it very difficult to sit down and expend the attention and effort to really look at and test my own software. I think because every little issue that I see becomes another job, another hassle, another delay in releasing. Maybe thats my "Bug Blindness", not sure if it's the same.
That is the reason why too many nerds recommended Linux as a "easy" windows alternative. What for us is easy to fix and often not even worth thinking about it, is impossible for a normal person.
Maybe? I think you may be underestimating how many papercuts of the same kind are there on Windows and on Macs. They're just harder to see when you're used to them.
Having giving support with windows and linux - I don't think so.
Recently things got way better with hardware support - but just making a printer work, used to be a unsolvable problem for my dad for example, who has a electro engineering background (but doesn't speak english, and error messages in linux are very seldom localized). In windows he put in the CD that came with the printer and it worked.
For the longest time, I had far more trouble getting printers to work in Windows (where I had to download a driver and hope that it worked right, and sometimes the only drivers offered were the ones for a different version of Windows than I had) than on Linux (where I just plugged in the USB cable and voila, the printer was autodetected). And I mean over a decade.
Since Windows 7 or so, I have seen the ease of installing a new printer driver in Windows rise to the level that Linux had always been at in my experience (I realize other people's experiences have differed). But it was shocking to me how easy Linux printing was for so long, vs how much I struggled when I had to install a Windows printer driver.
Yeah well, I don't usually print anymore, but just recently I did try to connect a printer that worked flawlessly on windows did not worked on my linux devices out of the box - and then I decided I rather do other things than printer troubleshooting.
As a contra-anecdote, my wife is not very interested in tech and has a Linux laptop for home use and a Windows laptop for work use. For both of them any attempt to use the printer is cursed. I think that's just printers for you :)
No, when they hit a problem with Windows, they blame Microsoft and/or their hardware. When they hit a problem with Linux, they blame the person that recommended it to them.
I'm with danluu on this, at least as far as the headline, and not actual details.
I run into 10 to 20 software bugs a day (feels like more). If it wasn't for the all the private data I'd leak I sometimes wish I could just put my phone and computer on screen capture for a week, with input data (keyboard/mouse/touchpad/screen) and then come back and post the 100 bugs I hit that week.
I've run into the MacOS one mentioned, getting a black screen on opening the lid. I've also run into iOS Camera app failing to open the camera. I've run into the iOS keyboard only using 80% of the width of the phone (all the keys smaller). No idea how to fix that. Closing the keyboard and re-opening does not. And killing the app, whatever app, is out because I'm in the middle of filling out a form and don't want to have to start over. I've had the phone's screen freeze quite often recently, no response to any finger presses. Locking and unlocking the phone recovers. This one is new (started happening 1-2 weeks ago)
Common/not-common. Any app that uses the phone camera to scan things (checks/ids) almost always fails in one way or another. Doesn't recognize the thing or times out like the only way they tested was in perfect conditions in their office and never tried with real users.
> I've run into the iOS keyboard only using 80% of the width of the phone (all the keys smaller).
Likely the one handed keyboard feature: https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/1mi7kjd/til_onehand...
> I've also run into iOS Camera app failing to open the camera.
wow, you just reminded me.
From time to time I bring up the camera app, and I just get a blurry screen. I have to lock the phone and unlock it, maybe quitting the camera app before I get the camera app coming up showing what the camera sees.
I just worked around it and got on with my life and didn't yak-shave (search for a solution or file a bug)
It shouldn't have that bug in the first place. It's not about yak-shaving
For me to spend time on it would be yak-shaving.
For me, pulling out a camera I expect to work to take a shot and missing the shot because the thing I was trying to take a photo/video of was over before I could get that camera to work is a the defintion of broken.
>I've run into the MacOS one mentioned, getting a black screen on opening the lid.
this is similar to what happens to me, if the screen goes dark to save battery and I move it to start back up too quickly, like within a couple of seconds, it will crash and restart.
So sometimes I see it is going to go dark and I move to stop it but it goes dark a microsecond before I touch the touchpad and then everything needs to start up again.
> I've run into the iOS keyboard only using 80% of the width of the phone (all the keys smaller).
Are you sure you're not triggering the compact width keyboard?
>> post the 100 bugs I hit that week.
But nobody cares. Posting bugs is mostly pointless, it's wasted time. Nowadays even for paid products quality is not a priority.
I also think it's due to normalization of deviance, people are just used to it..
- You can't build a model, because everything will be changed with the next update, so, even if not consciously, people won't do it, why bother learning something that's not going to be of any use next time you use the application.
- because you basically don't know how anything works, it's a coin toss whether it's actually not working, or you're just "using it wrong".
- most things won't do the thing you expect of them consistently, so you don't expect anything of them.
Last night, I uploaaded some documents to my insurance company => modal:
- Title: "Files successfully uploaded"
- Text: "An unknown error occurred"
- Button: "Ok"
Thank you.
>I thought this had something to do with how I use computers but, over time, I've realized that it's mostly that people are hitting the same bugs and don't notice.
I suspect I know why they do not notice. See below.
>it works well, etc., but when I open up the thing and try it, it's in a state where the thing only works if you do quite a few non-intuitive workarounds.
I suspect most people are so inept at navigating UI because even a good UI is not intuitive to them. A bad UI is equally not intuitive. They do not know it is a bug because everything is a bug to them.
I can use a novel UI and figure out where to find what I need to do very quickly. In my experience with lay people, they can use the software for a decade longer than me and still not understand some of the capabilities and navigate to utilize them as I can within a few minutes or small amount of research.
Shoutout to https://grumpy.website/. Love it.
>I suspect most people are so inept at navigating UI because even a good UI is not intuitive to them. A bad UI is equally not intuitive. They do not know it is a bug because everything is a bug to them.
This seems a weird thing to believe given that we know there are such things as black UI patterns designed to keep users from doing things they might want to do, but which the company might not want they do yet still are obliged to provide the possibility of doing.
As a general rule I think I am pretty good with finding out things about software, for example in pretty much every company I've worked at I'm one of the only devs who learns Jira's query language, and how to make my own dashboards to organize things, but I do at times experience UIs that I either must believe are malicious or buggy, and I stand by that interpretation no matter how they people who work at the company like to claim it is working as intended.
But I have also experienced some times when I think the way this UI works must be a bug, because otherwise the people who designed it must be incompetent idiots and also, given laws about accessibility requirements, potentially on the hook for some monetary payments in court soon.
My interpretation has been that I am often to quick to think things are bugs and not worthwhile using because I am familiar with how buggy things can be and still "work" somewhat, and also that normal uneducated users will try to soldier through things I just give up on because they don't realize that a thing should not be working the way it does, they think it is them that are wrong - as evidently you do as well. I think it is frankly a strange viewpoint to have in the world of software development, which world I assume you are a part of?
>I just give up on because they don't realize that a thing should not be working the way it does, they think it is them that are wrong - as evidently you do as well. I think it is frankly a strange viewpoint to have in the world of software development, which world I assume you are a part of?
I agree with, "They think it is them that are wrong", essentially. The end users that I deal with at the consumer level usually think they messed up when something does not do what they thought it was going to do.
>as evidently you do as well. I think it is frankly a strange viewpoint to have in the world of software development
Can you elaborate on this statement? I do not know whether you are agreeing with me and implying we are both strange or you are implying that I think that way and that is strange. Either way, I am not a developer, yet. I dabble in things.
I think, knowing that dark ui patterns exist - which I called black ui patterns by mistake earlier, I unfortunately very tired the last few days - and given the assumption I made that you knew something about how often bugs can actually come about, that thinking the users are to blame is very weird.
The users who don't know how often bugs occur and so forth always think that it is them to blame, but people who know about bugs and how things are made should probably think otherwise, but it seemed the way you phrased your initial post that you are in agreement that it is the fault of the users for whom the UI is always nonsensical and who never put in the necessary amount of effort to understand the UI.
This is rather interesting to read. But it reinforces something I've seen in my career. The majority of users of software I've helped build, they use it in ways that are mind bending to me. Workflows I would never think of, that somehow do what they need.
The second one is most software contains bugs. Users that expect to get things done simply choose workflows to avoid the worst consequence of those bugs very quickly.
> The second one is most software contains bugs. Users that expect to get things done simply choose workflows to avoid the worst consequence of those bugs very quickly.
I feel like a substantial source of everyday irritation are bugs like this in bad software. It’s frustrating that devs just don’t care.
You could make software that doesn’t require your users to work around its shortcomings.
> You could make software that doesn’t require your users to work around its shortcomings.
If the users are missing the mark so bad that they're wiping their asses with suede, I'd argue the documentation and examples are at fault.
Blackboard is definitely a really strong contender for the worst software I've ever had to use. When I was in uni, I went so far as to write an alternative that scraped the content from blackboard and published it on a site that I could actually browse sensibly.
They were paying exorbitant amounts of money for the license too.
Applications like Blackboard exist because of the genre of "Checkboxware."
A University must comply with Laws and Regulations X, Y, Z, P, D and Q and a host of other regulations the University never heard of and Blackboard went through the process to "comply" with those checkboxes. So, if you deploy Blackboard, you tick all the checkboxes automatically.
The fact that Blackboard was a garbage content management system and a terrible grade recording system was irrelevant--because the "better" systems wouldn't check the boxes.
(I say this as someone who, as a lecturer, had to manage the account logins, mailing list, and Subversion source control system for an entire class. I only ever put grades that needed to be "secure" into Blackboard. I did all that because I HATED Blackboard that badly, but it was a LOT of work. And I probably wouldn't have passed any significant security audit; although my accessibility ratings should have been excellent since everything was plain text and plain HTML)
It's not really regulation-driven. It's just what happens when the people buying software and the people using it are different. This is the standard problem of enterprise software is marketed to the IT department (which cares about cost, box-checking, vendor relationships, lock-in risk, bureaucratic turf wars, headcount preservation, SLAs, etc) with little or no regard for responsiveness to end user needs.
It is definitely true though that enterprise software for nonprofits (like education) sucks even harder than usual, because nonprofit IT departments don't even have the profit motive to align IT department and end user interests.
This goes even deeper than that.
Users don't choose their university by how good that university's software is (just as we don't choose apartment complexes and power companies this way). This gives university IT no incentive to deploy software that doesn't suck.
Banks and cellphones also used to work this way, until they suddenly didn't, which was quite a shock to the existing players in the market.
Part of it is also that universities mostly already tried building their own bespoke software in the 90s using 90s era technology and development practices, and got bitten by ending up with legacy software that they couldn't afford to maintain.
Our brain is geared towards efficient signal processing, and is actively working to delete signals it deems "unnecessary". It wants us to notice only the new and the unexpected; that's why after a short while you don't notice the same smell or the same recurrent noise. They are just ignored as "already detected / not new".
The reason for this may be evolutionary (although we don't know what traits were the most effective to help us survive in the wild); but there is a very practical reason to ignore signals, which is that there's so may of them: if we did process every data sent from every sensor and thought about odors, light, temperature, noise, etc. then we would be overwhelmed and could not do anything else.
That's also why we usually don't "see" things or people: we identify them. We don't see faces, we simply identify Alice or Bob. Which in turn explains why most people can't draw: the concept of Alice can't be drawn; to draw Alice we need to actually follow the features of her face. Being an artist means being able to unlearn (or disable) that identification process.
And I think the reason most people don't see bugs is similar: they're not interested, all they want is to get something done. If there's a simple workaround that makes the thing work, then that's good enough; all the rest is irrelevant. This is not bias or benevolence: this is efficiency.
Parts of this reminded me pleasantly of one of my favorite John Regehr posts, "Operant Conditioning by Software Bugs" https://blog.regehr.org/archives/861
This reminds me of my first job, where we did a lot of 3d modeling and mobile robotics research. When we were trying to reproduce motion bugs, a coworker of mine would track down our manager and put him at the controls. More times than not, the bug would surface and it'd trip our logging and we tracked it down.
I asked him why he does this. His explanation was really built on this operant conditioning idea: "we use this stuff for 8 hours a day and we train ourselves to avoid all of its little pitfalls. So I get the most available person who hasn't used it all day, which is our manager. He uses it differently than we do because he doesn't avoid all of its little problems. But if we have a really tricky problem, I get our manager's manager. I don't know if you've ever seen him try to use an xbox controller, but he has the spatial reasoning abilities of a goldfish. He's never failed to reproduce a really hard bug. If I ever needed an Einstein-level bug reproduction, I'd track down the head of the department and put him in front of it, but it's never come to that.
Reminds me of watching my wife use her computer. I'd help her with something and realize all the little things more regular computer users just put up with. Incorrect focus, focus stealing, windows popping up behind current windows, unclear window styling, invisible scrollbars, moving page elements, unclear instructions, the list goes on and on and on.
Unreal Engine is like this. You stab your toe about a thousand times for the first few months. Eventually you lean to stop pushing the buttons that crash.
"Time passed, and they resented the defects no longer. The defects had not been remedied, but the human tissues in that latter day had become so subservient, that they readily adapted themselves to every caprice of the Machine. The sigh at the crises of the Brisbane symphony no longer irritated Vashti; she accepted it as part of the melody. The jarring noise, whether in the head or in the wall, was no longer resented by her friend. And so with the mouldy artificial fruit, so with the bath water that began to stink, so with the defective rhymes that the poetry machine had taken to emit. All were bitterly complained of at first, and then acquiesced in and forgotten. Things went from bad to worse unchallenged."
- E.M Forster, The Machine Stops, 1909
http://emforster.de/hypertext/template.php3?t=tms
Bug: this blog has no max-width. Lines of text will grow infinitely long with width.
For what it’s worth, the author would not consider this a bug. He does it (as I understand) because he distrusts the research on the impact of line length on readability.
Which brings us to one of the earlier claims
"I easily observe hundreds to thousands of bugs per week"
which should be rewritten as
"I easily observe hundreds to thousands of things that I consider to be bugs per week"
which is to say that the "bug" is in the eye of the beholder. It seems the author stretches the definition of "bug" to include cases where something functions, but in a manner that is open to improvement or not to his taste.
It's less readable for me, never heard of any research. Whatever, there's reader mode.
To say nothing of this bit of markup, which actually raises an exception in the browser:
`<link rel="icon" href="data:;base64,=">`
Curiously, this makes Firefox display the default favicon (instead of no favicon):
https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox/raw/refs/heads/ma...
I had this same discussion on another HN thread a while back. I prefer lines to run as long as possible; I find it difficult/distracting to move my eyes to the beginning of the next line every few seconds. I'm sure I'm in the minority, but I have to believe I'm not the only one out there who feels this way.
Rather than having the website author wrap lines at a width that works for the average user or use case (which may only be optimum for a percentage of users or use cases, which may not include me), the user can simply make their browser whatever width they prefer the lines to wrap at. This way, everybody gets to choose what works for them.
> I find it difficult/distracting to move my eyes to the beginning of the next line every few seconds.
You must find it difficult to read books, magazines, newspapers, as all of them have short lines
To some degree, yes. Not to the point that I can't or won't do it, but I would certainly prefer books to be printed much wider. I can mitigate some of the issue by keeping my index finger along the left margin as I read, so I have a better idea of where my eyes need to jump to the next line. That technique is impossible with my computer screen, which is more than arm's length from me.
Part of the issue is that I read fairly quickly, so I find myself spending a relatively large percentage of my time skipping to the next line, and it's that frequent context switching that is annoying.
The bad text formatting in printed works (including the bizarre decision to sacrifice useful vertical position cues ("ragged right") to imitate the technique medieval scribes used to reassure their patrons they weren't wasting valuable parchment ("full justification")) is a big reason why I avoid them whenever possible.
I'm in the same boat as kmoser. I don't like narrow text lines either.
In my experience, books are mostly OK, as long as they don't split up the text in columns. Magazines and newspapers often do have columns that are much narrower than I would like.
I am in the same boat as GP, and I wonder if it's one of the reasons I migrated hard to ebooks and online magazines/newspapers as soon as that became possible and never looked back.
Making the browser windows narrow is a bad suggestion. Because most websites have some sort of navigation bar on the left and another bar on the right, so we need a wide enough window to get enough of the main text (width).
There are very few websites without those columns.
Surely between the browser window too wide (where the text lines are too long) and the browser window too narrow (where side bars are hidden) there exists a width that is exactly to your liking.
The point is that most websites have sidebars, but this one doesn't.
Let's say my preferred text width is 10 units. Due to sidebars, most websites require a browser window width of 20 units to show me 10 units of main text.
Then I visit this person's website and get text 20 units wide and it's very uncomfortable to read.
The text width I like doesn't change but the browser window width I need does change, and I don't want to change it when navigating around, to be honest.
I guess I could use the browser functionality to inject my own CSS rules for specific websites, then I could change the single-column no-max-width websites to show me a sensible text width.
But I also suppose that I'm not alone with this preference. I believe there have been studies about a suitable line length that is easy to read, and this is reflected in printed media. So those websites ask everyone to make such changes. That doesn't seem right.
Someone always complains about that when a danluu link is posted.
Every time I have to go back to the article (usually after having already read most of it) and notice "yes, it's using the whole browser window".
I think you can obtain the common experience of one sentence per screen and lots of scrolling by pressing ctrl/cmd and plus a couple times.
> Bug: this blog has no max-width. Lines of text will grow infinitely long with width
Are you maximizing your browser’s windows?
I do - I much prefer using computers with only one window visible. And use all the keyboard shortcuts (tab, window and desktop switching) to rapidly change what the thing it shows is.
I reckon there's something interesting about human variety in focus and/or visual processing this tells!
I, on the other hand, use the keyboard shortcuts to adjust the browser width to achieve the desired line width and line start, because even when the web page takes care to set these, it varies from site to site and rarely is what I want. (For sites I visit often, I use window manager automation to auto-adjust the browser window size.)
No. I keep my browser to about half of my 27" 4k monitor.
Thank god for Reading Mode in browsers...
By that token every CSS1 page is bugged.
I don't see that as a code-bug but a difference in implied requirements. Namely, the expectation about which person can/should choose the width of the lines everyone had to read.
Let's flip it around: Suppose someone put in code/markup to prevent any viewer from picking a larger or smaller font-size. Would that be "just fixing a bug", or would some of us be pissed that the author has dictated something in a way which infringes on our autonomy and disrespects our superior-knowledge about what constitutes our good reading experience?
Those habitual mitigations go a long way. Just like there is defensive programming, there is defensive usage.
Under Windows: Don't put your files into "My Documents" or similar folder hierarchies; you never know if old software will correctly deal with the abstraction.
Working with files in general: Avoid nonstandard unicode names or long paths so your external hard drive doesn't choke on them. Avoid case sensitivity even when it is allowed on Unix systems, since you can't assume Windows won't ever touch them. Avoid whitespaces in names because sooner or later, some script won't escape them.
On the internet: Never draft long comments in the browser; always use a local text file. Anything can happen in the browser.
In games: Never save your game during what looks like a complex scripted scene even if the game does allow saving.
Using search engines: Avoid keywords that are likely to confuse/distract the search.
With dropbox-likes: Give it some time to sync even after the icon is green; god knows what is being predictively shortcutted under the hood.
Everywhere: Restart the program or system if certain signs of corruption appear. You don't know what's going wrong, but you know something is, and barring some unusually careful compartmentalization, a piece of software is still a state machine which, once it has strayed from the right path, cannot be trusted at all. OSes nowadays are adapted to this, but much of software is not, and you do not want to have it corrupt your file.
>And, sometimes, the issues are severe, to the point where one might even say the thing actually doesn't work.
>I find this last category a bit mysterious, as when I look up discussions on how the thing got into this state ...
I'm currently on the dev side of such a product and can tell you one way it can end up like this.
Leadership decides a new feature is required, but refuses to commit to writing what they want. Through a bunch of meetings and calls developers have learned a number of vague requirements to the product, many which are conflicting, just as many are unclear if they are long term features or needed immediately.
The result is something that implements - to the letter, but not the spirit - of what the developers can agree on from this vague mountain of requirements.
The feature is returned to leadership in the hopes that having something tangible will make it clear what leadership actually wants.
However, leadership returns with a "Looks great, can you add?" and they sign off and we begin the next sprint.
While I agree on the fact, this is the typical case where you need a business analyst in between to 'translate' that requirement and confront the leadership if it is unclear.
If you mean that leadership IS the business analyst, then you are in trouble :D
This is why you write the PRD if you don't have a competent Product Manager to do so. Get sign off before implementation.
My absolute favorite bug is the one where the “cancel your Amazon Music subscription” is seemingly the only one of what must be tens of thousands of UI elements in the Amazon app that simply loads a blank white screen no matter what.
What are the odds!
If a website won't let you cancel, call your bank to force them to block the payment. This will cost the website $20 and a ding on their credit report. Be aware the website will ban you, so you'll need to make a new account.
Which is exactly why Amazon can get away with it. I’m not going to get permabanned from what is essentially a utility in the western world in 2026 by going nuclear with a credit card chargeback.
Sounds like credit card sites. Most everything is pretty creaky; “redeem rewards” is broken or offline for maintenance; “pay bill” is greased lightning all the way through.
I've noticed exactly the opposite with other kinds of lenders. Refinancing and renegotiation is optimized to the hilt, but the payments system seems to have an SLA of zero 9s.
One of the things I love about reading a bug report for a bug I've experienced is the feeling of solidarity it gives, a sort of "wow, me too, I thought I was the only one". I immediately recognized this issue, for example:
> when opening a new Google Doc, I used to immediately put the title I wanted into the doc. At some point, maybe ten years ago or so, Google Docs added some kind of delay such that the typing you do into the title box right after you open the doc gets overwritten, so I now have this habit where, after opening a Google Doc, I do something else and then I change the title.
I seriously doubt Google is going to do anything about this behavior, though.
It’s interesting the author ponders what they might be missing now. it seems like it’s the deterioration of the writing due to llms. I’ve liked some of the authors posts in the past. And might look in more detail at the differences between the old posts and new ones because it could be a great example for what to watch out for when using llms for writing and maybe coding.
There weren’t any concrete examples of bugs besides the Google Docs issue. Like what was so bad about blackboard (I also remember thinking it was terrible). There was a link to a great article about search but again no specific example here. There are a lot of words but not a ton of new information. Maybe I’m just bias against llms, this could have been written entirely without then for all I know.
Unnecessarily long post. It could have been 4x shorter and conveyed the same message better.
I usually agree with this sentiment. I have a general disdain for elaborations and novelization. Get to the point! Give me the necessary facts and make it concise!
In this case for some reason, I disagree. This post is engaging for me. I sometimes elaborate on how I came to a conclusion because that journey is equally as fascinating as the conclusion itself. While reading this authors post I was happy to see what seems like a very thorough thought process.
It was actually refreshing for me to see someone write at such length and find myself engaged.
It worked for me.
Now, putting my self in your shoes, as I have regularly had the same opinion, I have more empathy and understanding for how people consume and enjoy writing.
The world is fascinating.
If you think a bit, you'll notice that it's long but it's not padded for content length. It does not repeat the same thing 100 times with different wording. Every "bug" he talks about is somewhat different.
He would have written a shorter post, but he didn't have the time.
He only gave himself 30 minutes to write the post and publish it.
>Almost nobody objected to my characterization of Google and Bing search results, but people told me that I was wrong about Kagi. In some cases, people sent me their actual search results. In every such case, the search results did not contain a good result that I could see (e.g., for the seasonal forecast query, the search failed to return an up-to-date seasonal forecast) and was full of SEO spam. In one case, a person passed me both their list of Kagi filters as well as the search results they got without making claims that the results were good or bad, but people generally insisted the results were good even though the results both failed to link to a useful result and were full of spam except in cases where the user did something like pin GitHub to the top of their results, which worked for the queries where the goal was to download software that's hosted on GitHub, but of course completely fails for the other queries from the post.
This deserves to be a separate post. Kagi would be great if it were 10x less expensive. For the price that is paid, the very first click should deliver the answer or most relevant information to the search with five nines accuracy. Clicks that require a user to perform more digging or are simply rejected as spam should come with some SLA of 0.0001%
Have you ever done anything wrt search? What you ask is basically mind reading.
Google made it work from 1999~2006 before SEO was a thing.
Unfortunately we won't get a chance to see whether kagi could make it work before SEO was a thing, so this isn't a fair comparison.
(Not defending kagi necessarily, I've never tried it, no opinion on how it fares on today's Internet but comparing it to how 1999 Google did on the 1999 internet is absurd)
I do think a lot of these are not Bug Blindness, but a bar for acceptable quality standards.
A low bar means people walk past without realising it, a medium bar may take notice but it doesn't bother them and tends to get throw out within min or seconds. A high bar gets insane irritation that some may even call OCD.
And unfortunately, these spectrum follows an S curve. If you have a high bar, you are likely in the single digit percentage monitory. And the same is across all things not just software.
I've met with this attitude before. It's when developers interpret the function of QA to exclusively search for the situations where the expected functionality and actual don't match. They would reject anything coming from QA saying that the expected functionality is wrong.
So... do we restrict the meaning of the word "bug" only to the mismatched (developers') expectations, or do we extend it to cover bad expectations too? I'm in the later camp, because I'm not aware of even a single company that has any department or a process that would systematically address the existence of bad expectations. And, if anyone should be given the power to act on it, the QA seems to be the most likely candidate.
> So... do we restrict the meaning of the word "bug" only to the mismatched (developers') expectations, or do we extend it to cover bad expectations too?
Good thoughts and framing, thank you for that. I think I'm in the former camp, because I think fixing bad expectations is a matter of thoughtful redesign that should follow a slightly different process to fixing bad implementations (what I would call a bug). Not every issue in a program is a bug, and that has nothing to do with the importance or urgency to fix the issue.
Assuming a rigid product organization, I think developers _should_ ask testers to escalate "works according to spec" even if the spec is unreasonable. Otherwise developers might be torn between QA, UX, and architects fighting about how something should or shouldn't work. At least for me, finding myself in such a position is a recipe for excessive meetings and losing focus on other equally important matters.
I am in latter camp. Although I also agree with you on >escalate "works according to spec".
But let me use Steve Job's phase, "you must start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology".
A bug to developers is work according to spec, but a bug to a user is that is it has mismatched expectations. And it really should be someone's job to make sure this is corrected. But as parent said, there hasn't been one in most if not all companies.
And perhaps that is what makes old Apple such a success. They have a low pay $1 dollar salary beta tester to test out literally everything.
Fun post. Enjoyed it.
Haha it’s just that the things these devices enable for us are so valuable. But life is full of suboptimal things just because that’s how it is. Some other constraint causes it.
I was at Oren’s Hummus years ago with a friend and I remember thinking that there was this heat lamp outside by the window that was very close to the glass. We were halfway through our meal when we heard a loud snap and a large crack formed in the glass. Error in process, my failure to report it, and costly consequence. Bug, eh?
It’s just that the world is full of detail and things are full of interactions. And complexity is something we’re all constantly grappling with.
Every time I do the 5 finger gesture to bring up launchpad (I think that’s what it’s called) on a Mac the text field doesn’t focus fast enough for the text. Every time I type then backspace backspace backspace and type again. That’s just life. Somewhere someone shipped something that does this. It didn’t use to be this way but it is now. I can’t really change it so I just live with it.
The world of software is complexity upon complexity created from the fact that the virtual world admits arbitrary amount of interaction at much lower cost than the physical world. Yep, the world is full of bugs. But you really have to care a lot to stop them and no one really wants to pay you to do that.
Great post. Pins the tail on the donkey. As a lifelong Unix and Linux user, when I was forced to use Windows at work, this kind of thing struck me profoundly. Windows users just didn't notice how crippling the whole experience was. They'd write it off as "user error" when Word autocapitalized strings weven if auto caps was turned off, things like that, similar to "natural running motion".
Same for Linux and MacOS users. Fans are blind to their own OSes problems because they've become blind to its issues or gotten used to the workarounds. I use all 3, I run into issues on all 3 all the time.
Sure, but they're not the standard business operating system that the world economy depends on. We in the USA let Microsoft have a monopoly essentially because of this.
Is there also a thing called Readability blindness?
What’s wrong with the browser default styles?
You have one of the symptoms.
Like what? That my browser (Firefox) has no problem displaying the content with good contrast, font size, line height and so on?
It sucks.
Ticks all the boxes for readability for me:
+ good contrast
+ good size
+ good line height
+ adjustable line width
And so on. On the negative side, it’s a bit ugly.
> I get that people who are fans of things tend to be blind to the thing's faults.
Wow, there's Obsidian, Kagi, and Apple in a nutshell.
I think having my career be started in testing has broken my brain. Having seen so many different failure scenarios, it makes actual development difficult. Failure handling in particular is exceptionally difficult, especially when you're hitting low level filesystem errors.
If you can't write to the filesystem, almost everything you do in an embedded system will fail. So you can't undo a partial write. Your logging will probably fail too.
A relatively big database (a tier 2/3 database) that I was using handled this in a really bad manner: it'd just segfault. Depending on when this happened you could get data corruption and never be able to open the DB even in read-only mode.
It's one of the core principles of a database! And it didn't even do that correctly.
From the article: “For well over a decade, the reliability data that exists (and I think this is backed up by the anecdotal experience that mechanics who work on Volvos have) is that Volvo reliability is mediocre to poor, but of course Volvo forums are full of people who insist that Volvos are among the most reliable cars and that the data are all wrong.”
The author mentions one explanation, which is that most people driving a Volvo won’t experience a breakdown (and then generalize from that). Another one is of a very different kind known as post-purchase cognitive dissonance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance#Consumer_...).
A mistake that both Dan and the forum users made, was to discuss averages instead of reliability for certain platforms and/or engine types. Most manufacturers have models with wildly different reliability.
I’m really anal about the Quality of my own software, and tend to be hard on others’ software (doesn’t make me too popular).
> I've had multiple jobs where directors/VPs/execs/etc. sometimes ask me to evaluate something when they want an actual opinion from someone who is relatively likely to notice issues (and fix them or drive fixes for them if necessary).
I’ve had the experience where I need to be asked, and even then, if my opinion isn’t “ist güt,” it’s often ignored.
When someone makes a proposal, I tend to immediately see the potential issues, and used to point them out, and suggest workarounds or mitigation strategies, without being asked.
Not the happy path. I get accused of being “negative,” my suggestion is shitcanned, and I’m shunned.
I’ve learned to just keep my mouth shut, and if the situation calls for it, start quietly preparing for when the wheels fall off.
I have also learned to never say “I told you so,” as that is a petty and vindictive statement. Doesn’t help at all.
I feel for you and I'm similar too. However, there's a fine line between what you are describing and "perfect is the enemy of the good". I've seen some who claim to be like you but in practice they are a net negative to everything because they can never agree to anything until it is perfect even when the perfect solution is beyond the capabilities and/or out of project scope/budget and/or take too long to implement ignoring business needs.
Yup. Seen that, too.
But there’s a lot of room between “perfect,” and the "quality" of most of today’s tech, and I worked for a company that routinely shipped gear that had a very high level of Quality.
I’ve watched people use “Perfect is the enemy of good” to justify shipping absolute garbage.
We can do better. Much better.
> When someone makes a proposal, I tend to immediately see the potential issues, and used to point them out, and suggest workarounds or mitigation strategies, without being asked.
> Not the happy path. I get accused of being “negative,” my suggestion is shitcanned, and I’m shunned.
Absolutely right. People come up with some of the most idiotic ideas, but you aren't supposed to point out the obvious flaws. These 'ideas' create a lot of jobs and success stories. The purpose of a system is what it does. Everyone wants to build an empire and they need more and more headcount, which means incredibly shitty ideas, and tons of people working on them. Everyone claims success and moves on to the next shitty idea next year for more success. Thats why, even if AI can make developers more productive, it doesn't really matter, the vast majority of projects in bigcorp are bad ideas. If your bad ideas go faster, doesn't mean it increases revenue or profit. It only helps the people involved to claim more 'success'. Now, with AI.
Long ago I realized I had the ability to see race conditions in source code, at least more easily/accurately than others on average. It was helpful when reviewing the code of others, esp more junior. And I once briefly considered getting a custom T-shirt made with the words "I see race conditions." (in the spirit of the famous scene from The Sixth Sense with "I see dead people.") and wearing it to the office during formal code review meetings. But a friend talked me out of it when he pointed out it might get misinterpreted as being something racist rather than having to do with threading and concurrency.
The whole "I see bugs where others do not" reminded me of that same phenomenon.
"infinite looping, deadlocks, race conditions, memory leaks... these are the words I use to describe my ex-girlfriend"
I've had to live with shipping software with really poor quality that had loads of small bugs. My Product Manager forced me to. However, at the end, the customers seemed happy, and I have to admit that I was partially wrong.
The QA guys flushed out the big bugs and many of the small ones. Without any proof, I imagine something like 99% of the customers would hit only a few bugs, that they are used to compensate for (reloading pages etc), leading to a view of the product as having good quality. I was wrong: the sw quality is poor, but the percieved quality is good. I would of course prefer to do sw of much better quality.
Matches my experience. I think that 98% of the people that used our software were using only 2-3 battle-tested happy paths, and just never hit any bugs, not because there weren't any (there were hundreds of bugs in JIRA spanning 3+ years of development) but simply they didn't trigger the non-hot code path ever.
The software was crap, but it made money, so it wasn't crap.
That is something that should be obvious to any developer who worked with a real QA-team or person. They just have a different mindset.
The problem with contemporary software development is not only that often the majority of QA work is shifted left (meaning to the existing devs) but also that the developer mindset is contagious. Have QA-people, who are usually in the minority, work too long and too closely to the devs and they become blind.
I worked in V-model teams where the only communication between the development team and QA-team was supposed to be the spec. I still think that is the best way to develop software that works.
> Almost nobody objected to my characterization of Google and Bing search results, but people told me that I was wrong about Kagi.
Paying for a product makes you defensive, especially if there are free alternatives.
More significant I think is paying for software indicates you are more selective - inc. against defects.
Did I write this?
I choose tools I use, configure them, report bugs, and occasionally contribute fixes. But when I can't, I work around them, yet never get used to the workaround.
"Habitual mitigation" does not happen in me, and it's partly intentional.
I have created bad software in the past, but when I saw how people work with it, I could not be proud. Learned to look at software like a user, and don't want to unlearn that.
I believe (or maybe I hope) software will be democratized and people will start to demand good software.
> On the topic of Michael's comment, I think it's easy for programmers to not notice ads. Almost all programmers I know use an ad blocker and, in real life, their eyes seem to just skim over ads and not notice them.
How do you write this article and not notice that this should be the topmost example of people adapting to buggy software that doesn't at all work for its users without workaround cognitive hacks?
Banner blindness has been studied since a few years after ad banners were invented and advertisers started getting pissy they didn't magically triple their revenue, heh
Just a general pitch - please everyone use LLMs more to fix bugs and polish software to make it better for users.
It feels like too much of the benefit from it has been optimising, rushing new features/markets, tripping over ourselves with new processes, vibe coding things just for ourselves. When maybe it could actually make things better for most people using software in their daily lives.
I find the ad blindness and bug blindness similar but on opposite ends: I also notice bugs easily, but I also notice ads (instead of skimming — when ad blockers do not work or apply), yet I consciously make an effort to not be tricked and sometimes explicitly decide to not buy the product if the ad is obnoxious or really abuses the psychological findings for business' gain.
Hah in the AI era I noticed the agents are worse than the average person at noticing bugs. Agents use their own scale to decide if something is a success even if the output is broken. Agents are bug-blind to their own work. The consequence is that spotting bugs is now the key reviewer skill. The human’s job shifts to catching what the agent is blind to in its own work.
I want to use some of this guy's software to see how amazingly bug free it is, lol. This is weapons grade hubris & probably autism.
Although I do have to agree with him about Linguist. I also have a PR that was reviewed and then just never merged, despite multiple very polite prompts over several years.
> humans have a high ability to ignore negatives in things they're a fan of, including (and often especially) their own work
I thought this is due to the "backfire effect", because humans perceive criticisms of things they like as threats.
https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe
That's not what the term "backfire effect" refers to. The term "backfire effect" refers specifically to one specific consequence of this; namely, it refers to the idea that presenting evidence against something can make people more likely to believe it. (And my understanding is that in later studies this "backfire effect" appears to not actually exist after all, as Wikipedia appears to back up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belief_perseverance )
I'm not sure what the term is for what you're referring to, although it's certainly a real and known effect.
I feel cursed with the opposite of this. I can't seem to go 12 hours without finding a bug in software which it's not my job to test. It's all so awful. I waste a lot of time trying to figure out how to report these bugs, because they offend me.
Just once I'd like to believe, for a little while, that this industry has produced something worth being proud of.
This hits. Ive had an annoying issue with Codex VS Code extension for weeks if not months when queuing up a follow up. Often it just disappears, I think it's just a UI glitch is actually queued but I can't click steer if the UI doesn't update and I find myself automatically going CMD+A, CMD+C before sending a follow up message.
> At times, I've tried to see if I can get a job somewhere where I just fix quality issues all day. This has never panned out, due to some combination of this not being a very high priority and it also not being a normal role that companies have a role for.
I'm pretty sure dedicated QA roles are a thing at many companies.
Isn't the classic QA role typically about finding bugs not necessarily fixing them?
Ok, but who do you think fixes the bugs? There must be countless devs out there who are slaves to fixing Jira tickets all day, so I still don't understand OP's assertion that full-time bug fixer isn't a thing.
What I see a lot is working with developers who believe the goal is to write software that can complete the task. They demo it, release it and watch it immediately fall apart with first contact with the user.
What they should be doing is having a goal of software that cannot fail to complete the task.
I also see bugs others, especially developers, are blind too. I've wasted I'm not sure how many hours reporting bugs to unresponsive companies and teams. Often the problem is not only that the developers cannot see or believe the bugs, but that there is no channel for reporting them. Even many open source projects resist receiving and addressing bug reports submitted by users. Commercial companies actively shield developers from users to the point where 9-figure customers have to escalate to a VP (who they can actually talk to because they're a hundred-million dollar customer) to get action on a serious bug affecting them, instead of just emailing the SWE 3 who's ultimately going to make the one line fix after the message gets passed down through many layers of emergency meetings.
When I worked at Google, it was at least possible to report bugs internally with some hope they would be addressed. Sometimes you could even fix them yourself, given enough time and the relevant skills. Bug bankruptcy was still a thing. Teams would simply throw away all the SWE-years that had gone into documenting and reporting issues in their systems. But there was some possibility you'd get action, at least if you were a squeaky enough wheel and used the right back channels. But now that I'm outside the plex, there's basically no mechanism to report issues unless you're a tech vlogger with a large following inside Google or a >= $100,000,000 customer. Most other companies are much the same. They're not just blind to bugs. They're deliberately putting bags over their heads to keep from seeing what users are telling them.
I think at least half of the software developers out there simply don't test their code in the final product (or at all). And why would they when their revision is being reviewed in a pull request?
Reading the first part of the article I thought it was about real bugs and I was like "Wow we are surrounded by hundreds to thousands of bugs a week, but are blind to them somehow".
> Bug Blindness
This is why I find that it is better to wait a couple of months before actually do the final test before shipping your own software.
A bit of perfectionism helps with esp UI bugs. A little flash, slight unusual pause, trying different ways to break the code..
Does having a website with no set-width and unusable without reader mode counts as bug blindness?
No. Designers shouldn't force their own preferences on third parties. Everybody likes different text presentation, so websites should stick to the defaults and let readers configure their browsers as they prefer.
> Designers shouldn't force their own preferences on third parties.
Fallback to the default is a design choice, even if it doesn't look like it
I'd say it does, since it doesn't work well.
That’s how perception works. We only see what we want to see, and discard or explain away the rest.
An interesting version of this is when a team basically internalizes some issues in the software they work on and it turns into something they accept as a fact of life or even turn into a joke. „X failed again? Don’t bother, it’s been a shitshow for years.” What?!
A few years ago I started leading a team working on a product that had a lot of „legacy” quirks like that. It took me a good while to set a strong quality bar, both mentally and technically. I would frequently point out where the mindset was wrong, prioritize certain fixes over project work, fix a lot of issues myself, fight with other teams to fix their stuff, run silly contests such as „who solves the most support tickets this month gets a prize” and sometimes even „stop the world” for a few days until we got something in order.
Some people might be prone to think their team will never have the time to do that (and some may be right) but in my experience quality pays back. Often fixing a small bug takes about as long as discussing if it’s important, properly filing it in JIRA and then communicating to the outside world it’s not the priority. And eventually you reach a point where you have way more calm and focus than before because nothing is burning.
What does the author have a against a text size that’s readable?
The page does not set a text size. You are complaining about your own browser's defaults.
Browser defaults suck, then.
This is classic "works fine on my machine".
The default for paragraph layout does suck indeed. But at least the font you should be able to customize.
It's larger than HN on my browser. It seems to just be what you have your browser default to.
Asking others for feedback is absurdly powerful.
Some developers treat their software like a baby when they test it or show it to others. Tapping cleanly and slowly, giving animations time to finish, scrolling slow and smooth, etc.
I like to beat the shit out of my software when testing. Constant erratic scrolling and zooming, multi-touch shenanigans, pressing multiple buttons as fast as I can, using back gestures and the browser back button (if it's a web app), changing the window size and orientation frantically, and just all kinds of rough usage.
If your software can't cope with these things then you're doing a disservice to your users.
I agree quality blindness is curable. Many communities (e.g. Japanese, Swiss, Yemeni, Peruvian etc) have shown attention to detail is just a learning and, most importantly, social status process. Bugs are just the opposite of caring, and caring is at odds with hustle culture. I think Apple is a great example here - used to be meticulous and now every day the amount of tiny defects is just infuriating (just now I realised, for example, that Photos can't scroll with a mouse).
Is that why your blog is plain white text on a black background, so it's less buggy?
there’s a general dismissive attitude with these bugs. When you report them, customer service responds with incredulity, and continues to explain that’s how the software is supposed to work.
CS has been trained to close conversations, not to resolve issues.
I’ve reported critical issues with my bank where the accounting was broken, money was missing, transfers were inconsistent. Customer service loves to explain “well that’s just how the system works”.
Sorry no, the system has failed. It’s an accounting system, and by definition needs to be accurate, or at least report an error if it can’t remain consistent.
The same standards that would fail an interview are completely ignored for paying customers.
Lmao I thought it was going to be an article discussing insects' ability to see.
> so the non-LLM options here are some posts that are much sloppier than my normal posts (in a human slop kind of way), or almost no posts.
I'm a little confused, but as far as I understand this is a LLM-written post, isn't it? That would explain the very big length of it. Or maybe I've understood things wrong, in which case my excuses to the writer (which, in that case, could reasonably be called a writer).
The author uses LLMs for research but writes the articles by hand:
"with LLMs, it's so much easier to look at data and figure things out, but the time it takes to write something up hasn't fundamentally changed"
Thanks for the input, wasn’t sure if he was just copy-pasting his finds directly or not, looks like he isn’t.
> Who else uses the Shift key to end the screensaver, because in case the event goes through to an actual program it's least likely to do have unintended effects?
Hahaha. Yup. That's me :) Not the screensaver in my case. I leave my desktop "suspended to memory" overnight, and when I come back in the morning / afternoon, to wake it up I press the Shift key.
But, more on the subject, I kinda find it disappointing that the post doesn't try harder to analyze why this happens to the developers. The explanation doesn't feel satisfactory to me.
This was my experience working on a product that was virtually universally believed by its programmers to be of good if not excellent quality, while, in reality it was atrocious. Just to give you a taste of the quality: Jenkins landing page didn't work because it would take too long for it to load and various timeouts that happen when it fails to load would kick in and just mess it up so much it wouldn't have been useful anyways. Jenkins tests were generated from some horror-show templates written in YAML (some RHEL tool, forgot what it's called) and because there was no other way to test what the template generated other than to deploy the new test into the actual Jenkins server, the server was full of dysfunctional "orphan" (no longer tied to any template) tests that were never deleted. The only way to navigate to the test results of the job you were interested in where to memorize the way the templated name would expand into the URI components of the Jenkins job URL, have some other test results bookmarked, and then modify the URL of the bookmarked page to get the URL of the job you want.
The CI/CD team, however, decided to combat this situation by developing their own server which collected data from Jenkins and displayed a table with the most recent results for select jobs. Green and red being used to indicate whether the job succeeds or fails, the table was mostly red most of the time, with some jobs being continuously red for many months.
Initially, I was hired into CI/CD team, but when I remarked on the desperate state of events in CI/CD department... they wanted me fired, but the company was going through acquisition and they wanted a higher headcount, so, they kept me, but transferred into the least relevant department where I would be as useless as possible: the quality control!
My life as SDET (because QA is a curse word nowadays) exposed me plenty to the situation described by the author. The aspects that the author didn't touch on is that programmers working on such a product that I've experienced a lot are:
* Unwillingness to accept that a large proportions of the product is bad. People have this intuition that some parts might be bad. After all, that's why QA exists: they find a few things, things get fixed, and everyone moves on. And this is how it works in passable quality products. But the situation when everything is on fire and is going to hell in due course sounds alarmist to the people who are on fire and are going to hell in due course. After a certain amount of complaints, all further complaints are dismissed.
* Unwillingness to accept the existence of strategic mistakes. The QA simply is not allowed to voice their opinion on product or feature design. The only way a tester can initiate a fix is if they can create a test that illustrates the problem. Saying, for example, that "our error reporting is bad because it's useless to the customer and it cannot be meaningfully reported back to the developers" was dismissed as "nothing to do here" (but, actually, meaning: it's above your paygrade).
I don't believe either of these would've been fixed by "simply pointing out the bug", as the author claims. Our industry came to a particular way of doing things that are pathologically bad. The way QA works is OK-ish, when the product itself is of an OK-ish quality. When the product is really bad, the QA is powerless to initiate a fix. QA isn't trusted enough, and, usually, is perceived as a liability, and furthermore, stuffed with engineers nobody else wants. Unless this is changed, the pathologically bad products (like the Blackboard) will have no hope of ever improving (eventually, they will just die either under their own weight, or replaced by something else).
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